JD Vance

NBC News - In his first month as former President Donald Trump’s running mate, JD Vance has turned heads with his past comments about “childless cat ladies,” as well as his views about marriage, children and families. Democrats have made his sometimes aggressive support of more conventional family dynamics the basis of their case against him as a national candidate. But those close to Vance, a first-term Ohio senator, say his relationships with the women who raised him are key to understanding his worldview on the thorny cultural issues for which he has become known. Vance also acknowledged in a recent interview that his upbringing shaped his sharp opinions.

In his book, “Hillbilly Elegy,” Vance portrays his grandmother as a profane but loving matriarch herding a family often in crisis. His mother battled drug addiction and, according to his book, once “beat the s---” out of him.“My sister had five husbands, and that’s not to mention the men that were in and out of their lives that she didn’t marry before she got her crap together,” Lori Miebers, Vance’s aunt and one of the women who took him in when his mother could not, said in an interview with NBC News. “He’s seen that side of life and living.”

In his book, Vance also celebrated his older sister’s marriage to “someone who treated her well and had a decent job,” breaking the cycle of abandonment and dysfunction that defined their childhood.  MORE