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Yesterday afternoon JD Vance concluded his busy midterm election campaign tour at a rally at the Toledo airport, where he warned voters about “illegal communities of illegal immigrant Somalis who are coordinating to flood the polls and drown out your vote.” Back in June he published his second memoir, Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith, which is, per the book’s promotional copy, “a spiritual exploration of what it means to be a Christian in all the seasons of life.”

So what is Communion like? “A very bad and boring book, in ways that greatly exceed even the badness and boringness of Hillbilly Elegy,” writes Mark O’Connell in the Review’s November 19 issue. But the quality of the book is almost beside the point. The real achievement, O’Connell elaborates, is in the gap between what Vance writes in his memoir and how he behaves as vice president:

Can this man really be claiming that his experience of an intellectually and spiritually broken elite led him to embrace the presidency of Donald Trump? Does he really expect his readers to overlook the lurid venality and corruption of an administration of which he himself is a central figure—to simply forget about the crypto pump-and-dump schemes, the lavish gifts from foreign interests, the vast fortunes amassed by the president and his family in his second term—and unquestioningly accept this abject excuse for a moral rationale?

Below, alongside O’Connell’s review, are four essays from our archives about James David Vance.

Mark O’Connell
Evolution of a Cynic

JD Vance’s new memoir attempts to sidestep the vice-president’s ambitions with a shallow recounting of his conversion to Catholicism.

Fintan O’Toole
Forced Amnesia

The metamorphosis of J. D. Vance from economic realist to champion of Trump’s grievance-fueled politics reveals how little Democrats have done to connect with working-class Americans.

—May 29, 2025

Sean Wilentz
Vance’s Junk History

1. D. Vance has cited Andrew Jackson to justify the idea that a president can disobey the federal judiciary’s rulings. The historical record says no such thing.

—April 25, 2025

Ben Tarnoff
Venture-Backed Trumpism

Trump’s selection of the Ohio senator J.D. Vance as his running mate has thrilled his Silicon Valley backers. Vance has long-standing ties to tech thanks to his friendship with the venture capitalist Peter Thiel, who helped him break into the industry as a recent Yale Law graduate.… “WE HAVE A FORMER TECH VC IN THE WHITE HOUSE GREATEST COUNTRY ON EARTH BABY,” Delian Asparouhov, another Thiel-linked venture capitalist, hollered on X after the announcement.

—September 19, 2024

Nancy Isenberg
Left Behind

One of the most revealing parts of Vance’s story concerns his cultural conditioning at Yale, where he received “tens of thousands in need-based aid” as “one of the poorest kids in school.” From an academic perspective, he observes that his cultivation of the hidden rules of class power involved acquiring “social capital.” What he doesn’t say in his memoir, but subsequently acknowledged in an interview, is that his ability to get his memoir published was a perk he owed to his Yale connections.

—June 28, 2018

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