Vance Admitted Lying as an Adult
Vance Admitted Lying as an Adult
Vance's book acknowledges his lying, without remorse or responsibility
The Vance Files: This article is one of a series examining the early writings and record of vice presidential candidate Sen. JD Vance (R-OH). You can support TFN’s reporting with a paid subscription or one-time donation.
Sen. JD Vance (R-OH) is an admitted liar, according to his own book, which includes examples but slender indication of remorse or change.
With less than two years in public service, the running mate of former Pres. Donald Trump (an admitted and virtually unprecedented liar in politics) has been accused multiple times of lying just in the weeks since his nomination.
His best-selling memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy,” recounts multiple times Vance himself says that he lied as an adult and suggests there were more. Despite Vance’s claims of self-awareness and Christian faith, he never reconciles his lies with moral or religious imperatives not to lie.
What he lies about is himself. He lies about his background, his family, and whether he attends Yale. He even lies in the book itself.
“Hillbilly Elegy” was widely seen as a call for personal responsibility. In it, Vance writes that “hillbillies” often blame others for their failures, among which he counts a culture of dishonesty. Despite this, Vance does the very same thing, attributing his own dishonesty to perceived cultural conflicts in his life rather than to his own choices or character.
“I had lied,” he writes. “‘My mom is a nurse,’ I told them,” referring to his law-school friends. “But of course that wasn’t true anymore.”
Apparently, he lied in this manner for a while, recalling that over time, “I became less comfortable with the lies I told about my own past.” But he never says that was because lying is wrong.
Instead, Vance lost his shame about his childhood, understanding that he as a child had nothing to be ashamed of.
It was this lack of shame, rather than penitence for his dishonesty or remorse for deceiving people, that led him to stop lying to his friends. And he wanted them to appreciate the people he credited for his success. “I was concerned most of all that no one understood my grandparents’ outsize role in my life. … So maybe I just wanted to give credit where credit is due.”
Vance describes entirely understandable childhood lies told in horrific circumstances, when he was seeking to keep his abusive mother out of jail, for instance. But the lies he tells in his 20s — after college, after the Marines — have no such exigent circumstances.
In fact, his adult lies seem to arise in situations he himself creates with his actions or decisions about how to see things. One incident occurs at a gas station back home while he’s in law school, after a fellow customer strikes up a conversation.
I noticed that she wore a Yale T-shirt. “Did you go to Yale?” I asked. “No,” she replied, “but my nephew does. Do you?” I wasn’t sure what to say. It was stupid—her nephew went to school there, for Christ’s sake—but I was still uncomfortable admitting that I’d become an Ivy Leaguer. The moment she told me her nephew went to Yale, I had to choose: Was I a Yale Law student or was I a Middletown kid with hillbilly grandparents?
…
“No, I don’t go to Yale.”
It’s a strange scenario on its face. Vance himself raised the subject he says was fraught for him. Vance chose to see himself in essentialist terms (he didn’t just attend Yale, he became an Ivy Leaguer). And Vance imposed this mutual exclusivity, as if no human could reconcile a Middletown kid at Yale.
Vance’s reasoning for the lie doesn’t address any character flaw he might have. Instead, it’s premised on the conceit in his mind that Yale’s matter must never touch Appalachia’s anti-matter.
If he were a Yalie, Vance writes, “I could exchange pleasantries and talk about New Haven’s beauty.” But in Vance’s mind, even though she didn’t go to Yale and was at a gas station near his home, “At her cocktail parties and fancy dinners, she and her nephew probably even laughed about the unsophisticates of Ohio and how they clung to their guns and religion.” Loyalty to his hillbilliness compelled the lie:
I would not join forces with her. My answer was a pathetic attempt at cultural defiance…
This wasn’t one of my prouder moments, but it highlights the inner conflict inspired by rapid upward mobility: I had lied to a stranger to avoid feeling like a traitor.
“There are lessons to draw here,” he says. None of them is that lying is wrong.
Excluding that lie from his set of prouder moments is the closest Vance comes to acknowledging the ethical problems with uncoerced lying. And he never examines whatever impulse led him to ask about the T-shirt, if the subject were so fraught. Or whether he felt like a traitor lying to his friends at Yale.
[A]s law school acquaintances became close friends, I became less comfortable with the lies I told about my own past. “My mom is a nurse,” I told them. But of course that wasn’t true anymore.”
Vance pins the blame for his dishonesty on the cultural rift between his childhood and life at Yale.
And yet, Vance never grapples with the reality that plenty of people with equally dissonant cultural backgrounds don’t lie about it. Many certainly figure out how to discuss or avoid it honestly by the time they’re in their mid-20s.
But even as recently as last month’s Republican National Convention, Vance continued a years-long pattern, as I previously reported, of ambiguity about some aspects of his military service.
The lies Vance told as a child obviously aren’t an indictment of his character today, but his discussion of them in his memoir may offer some insights into when and why he lies.
“Even as a kid I’d lie when people asked if I attended church regularly,” he wrote. Then, too, the reason was “cultural pressure.” But that doesn’t quite fly, either, because as he notes in the previous paragraph, “Appalachia … has far lower church attendance.”
In fact, the year the book came out, Vance said in an interview, “we tend to think of these areas as the Bible Belt, where everyone is going to church and everyone is actively involved in religious community. That’s not that true.”
So it’s unclear why Vance would blame cultural pressure. And why he doesn’t address the moral implications of succumbing to what he calls Appalachia’s “pattern of deception.”
Similarly, he says he pretended to be someone he wasn’t in order to please the men in his mother’s life, but never confronts the reality that not all kids do that.
With Steve, a midlife-crisis sufferer with an earring to prove it, I pretended earrings were cool — so much so that he saw it appropriate to pierce my ear, too. With Chip, an alcoholic police officer who saw my earring as a sign of “girliness,” I had thick skin and loved police cars. With Ken, an odd man who proposed to Mom three days into their relationship, I was a kind brother to his two children. But none of these things were really true.
By contrast, with his family in Kentucky, “I didn’t have to pretend to be someone I wasn’t, because the only men in my life — my grandmother’s brothers and brothers-in-law — already knew me. Did I want to make them proud? Of course I did, but not because I pretended to like them; I genuinely loved them.”
Again, he doesn’t explain why he had to pretend at home. Plenty of kids don’t, even in dysfunctional homes.
And Vance never addresses the obvious pattern of his admitted lies. It’s not to pick up girls or gain financial advantage. It’s about how he feels in a social context.
Explaining his lies, Vance offers cultural explanations, of the “society made me do it” sort so sneered at by the right.
He cites academic research that “suggests that hillbillies learn from an early age to deal with uncomfortable truths by avoiding them, or by pretending better truths exist.” This, he concludes ironically, “makes it hard for Appalachians to look at themselves honestly.”
In a meta-commentary on this ostensible Appalachian dishonesty, Vance writes that, “We tend to overstate and to understate, to glorify the good and ignore the bad in ourselves.” There’s no hint of awareness that his statement itself is an example of what he’s describing.
Nevertheless, Vance declares himself free of Appalachia’s pernicious influence, asserting that “I spent the first eighteen years of my life pretending that everything in the world was a problem except me.”
Never mind that, even in the book itself, he was still blaming his lies on the culture.
After the book came out, Vance had this exchange with Megyn Kelly, who said she worried about him after reading the book:
Vance: Why?
Kelly: I wondered if you had really dealt with everything.
Vance: That’s a really good question. … I think that the honest answer is that I probably haven’t dealt with everything.
Vance went on to say that it’s a lifelong process. But now, alongside Trump, in front of MAGA crowds, Vance has found a cultural home in which he no longer has to explain his lies, let alone take responsibility for them. He can just lie about them.
Jonathan Larsen is a veteran journalist and TV news producer who’s worked at MSNBC, CNN, ABCNews, and TYT. You can support his independent reporting with a paid subscription to his occasionally obnoxious newsletter, or by making a one-time donation.
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