The fake-populist, extreme-MAGA Republican J.D. Vance of 2024 is a far cry from the more-moderate ruminations of JD Hamel, Vance’s earlier legal name. Vance-Hamel’s first blogging effort, started on July 11, 2005, was to commemorate his Iraq deployment. A few years later, a different blog discussed his days at Yale Law School.
The military-focused blog was written not in the voice of performatively masculine Vance we see on the 2024 campaign trail—rather, the tone and substance reflects a scared, religious kid about to be deployed to Iraq.
“Needless to say it was a crappy day, and I hate airports, and yesterday was incredibly emotional for me,” he wrote on July 30, 2005. “I honestly can say that I felt more like a female than I think I ever have or will.”
He added, “Yesterday I cried twice, and along with the time my grandma died those are the only times I’ve cried since I was 13 years old. So yesterday was weird, and I read a lot yesterday, from a biography on Winston Churchill, one of my heroes, and the Bible.”
While the Iraq-deployment blog only has four entries, Vance-Hamel’s later blog has a bit more content—but not by much. From the inaugural post in that series:
Why start a blog? I have two reasons. The first is that I’m setting off on this new adventure, and I’d like to stay anchored and analyze the experience. So it’s like a diary, only far more masculine. I also want to keep my friends and family up to date on how life’s treating me.
Later, Vance-Hamel’s blog meanders around from going to see Yale’s acapella-singing group the Whiffenpoofs to an anecdotes about Robert Bork, who one of his classmates noted “was an asshole.” His last post included the observation, “I tend to put Democrats who whine about the budgetary effects of tax cuts in the same category as Republicans who whine about international aid for the same reasons.”
In 2024, The Bulwark‘s Andrew Egger notes that the current Vance would not recognize Hamel’s writing: “the most interesting thing about Vance’s blogging isn’t just the reinvention it highlights. All of that is what it is; Vance is hardly the first Republican to recast himself as a MAGA populist the better to thrive in Donald Trump’s party. What’s more striking is the truth his blogs reveal: The old Vance would be genuinely repulsed by the Vance of today.”
Vance’s use of the name JD Hamel is explained by Vanity Fair:
Vance was born James Donald Bowman, after his biological father, Donald Bowman, who separated from Vance’s mother Beverly when he was young. When Beverly later remarried, Vance was adopted by his stepfather and became James David Hamel; this is the name he kept through his early adulthood. He went by J.D., before and after the name change, but when he enlisted in the Marines, he was known officially as Corporal James D. Hamel. Then in 2013, around the time he was admitted to the bar, he opted to change his surname to Vance.
