Senator J.D. Vance, who has been picked by Donald Trump as his running mate at the ongoing Republican National Convention, has repeatedly spoken highly of the Hungarian government's policies. In recent years, the 39-year-old senator, who is particularly young in the American political elite, has set Hungary's family and education policies to Americans as examples.
At a conference back in 2021, as a Senate candidate, he blamed the "childless left" for the problems in the United States because they have no "physical commitment to the future of the country". He pointed to several high-ranking Democrats as examples, starting with Vice President Kamala Harris.
In Hungary, on the other hand, newly married couples are offered loans that are forgiven at some point later if those couples have actually stayed together and had kids, Vance said as an example.
Why can't we do that here? Why can't we actually promote family formation,
the British newspaper The Guardian quoted Vance, who was running for a Senate seat in 2021.
On another occasion, speaking on CBS News, he talked about a left-wing bias at American universities. The senator took the view that American universities are already "controlled by left-wing foundations", and taxpayers have little say in how their money is spent.
"Universities are part of a social contract in America," he said, and "if they're not educating our children well, and they're layering the next generation down in mountains of student debt, then they're not meeting their end of the bargain," Vance stressed.
The idea that taxpayers should have some influence in how their money is spent at these universities, it's a totally reasonable thing, and I do think that he [Viktor Orban] has made some smart decisions there that we could learn from in the United States,
the senator said.
J.D. Vance has condemned the European Union's policy towards Hungary.
If you want to have a rules-based international order, you shouldn’t penalize Poland or Hungary for having politics that are different from Brussels—but that’s exactly what they’ve been doing. So I think it’s completely absurd on its face,
he said in an interview on the sidelines of this year's Munich Security Summit.
J.D. Vance, who served in the marine corps during the Iraq war, grew up in a poor family in Middletown, Ohio, and later managed to go on to the Yale Law School, one of the top law schools in the US. He rose to fame with his book Hillbilly Elegy, which describes his upbringing. In an interview, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said that the book moved him to tears.
Vance has repeatedly spoken out against support for Ukraine, which has made him countless enemies in Washington. For example, in an opinion piece in The New York Times, he wrote
it is not the Republicans who stand in the way of Ukraine's victory, but math.
Regarding the Middle East conflict, he fully supports Israel's war against Hamas, saying that in order to reach an agreement between Israel and Saudi Arabia, Israel must first "finish the job" on Hamas.
Cover photo: Ohio Senator and 2024 Republican VP candidate J.D. Vance attends the first day of the 2024 Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. (Photo: AFP/Brendan Smialowski)
