In his 2016 memoir, wrote in awe of his older sister, who, despite an upbringing filled with trauma, broke the cycle of abandonment and dysfunction that defined their childhood. “There was something heroic about Lindsay’s marriage — that after everything she’d witnessed, she’d ended up with someone who treated her well and had a decent job,” Vance, , observed in the pages of “ .” His sister had, in Vance’s words, “built a life almost in opposition to the one she left behind — she would be a good mother, she would have a successful marriage (and only one).
” Her husband, he wrote, “never mistreated her,” adding that was “all I ever wanted in a mate for my sister.” The passage is laden with new meaning now. People close to Vance say his relationships with the women who raised him are key to understanding his worldview on the thorny cultural issues for which he in his first month as Donald Trump’s running mate.
He internalized violent episodes and other hard lessons of his youth and idealized the more conventional family dynamics he never knew, forming fiercely held opinions about marriage, children and families that have become the basis of Democrats’ case against him as a national candidate. Vance, whose comments mocking “ ” in politics recently resurfaced, is the son of a single mother who battled drug addiction and, according to his book, once pulled over the car “to beat the s---” out of him. Vance’s rationalization that parents .