Inside JD Vance’s Inner Circle (2025)

Staff

Reses — a graduate of Princeton University in 2013 and Stanford Law School in 2023 — was a close friend of Vance’s before becoming his chief of staff in 2022. Prior to that, he was a senior policy adviser to Sen. Josh Hawley and an aide to Russell Vought at Heritage Action, the advocacy arm of the conservative think-tank the Heritage Foundation. Reses is known as Vance’s right hand man and closest political strategist on Capitol Hill, handling much of the day-to-day political blocking and tackling for Vance. Like Vance, he has undergone something of an ideological transformation: He interned for both Hillary Clinton and John Kerry when he was younger, before moving to the right at Princeton and eventually embracing Vance’s brand of conservative populism.

A hard-charging (and hard-smoking) aide, Braid is the architect of Vance’s major policy initiatives in the Senate — including the Rail Safety Act — and is trusted by Vance with translating his New Right worldview into policy proposals. Before working for Vance, Braid was a legislative assistant at the Heritage Foundation’s lobbying arm and a staffer for Russell Vought during his stint as the director of the Office of Management and Budget during the Trump administration.

Another of Vance’s young guns, King worked as the research director of American Compass — the hub of the self-described new “pro-worker conservative economics” in Washington run by the conservative economist Oren Cass — before joining Vance’s office in 2022. Before that, he was a policy advisor to GOP Sen. Mike Lee of Utah, held a fellowship at the conservative Claremont Institute and worked as a management consultant at McKinsey & Company. He plans to leave Vance’s office in August to attend Harvard Law School.

Kofsky — who worked as a policy advisor to Securities and Exchange Commissioner Mark Uyeda before joining Vance’s office — is a key influence on Vance’s economic thinking and his work on the Senate Banking Committee. He has helped Vance flesh out his opposition to some cryptocurrency regulation and his effort to introduce new banking regulations after the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank in March 2023.

A former foreign service officer with two advanced degrees in international relations from the University of Oxford, Baker has played an important role in shaping Vance’s foreign policy positions, especially his opposition to U.S. aid to Ukraine and his skepticism of NATO.

Political Operation

Chabria oversaw Vance’s ground game in Ohio during his 2022 Senate campaign and remains one of his closest links to the state’s Republican establishment. In 2017, Chabria worked as a consultant for Vance’s short-lived non-profit, Our Ohio Renewal, which hired only a handful of staffers before downsizing in 2018 and eventually going belly-up in 2021.

Thompson ran Vance’s allied super PAC in 2022 and is credited with crafting the unorthodox strategy that allowed the super PAC — and its major funder, Peter Thiel — to pick up the political slack that Vance’s bare-bones campaign couldn’t sustain. As part of that strategy, Thompson set up a secret public website containing troves of documents — including internal polling, memos and opposition research — designed to allow the super PAC to share information with the campaign without violating campaign finance law. The site was eventually discovered by Vance’s opponents, causing a major black eye for the campaign.

Martin — a native of Cincinnati — joined Vance’s 2022 campaign after working for Rep. Lance Gooden (R-Texas) and became his communications director when Vance entered office. He has since transferred over to the presidential campaign, where he will run Vance’s communications operation from Trump campaign headquarters in Florida. He is the executor of Vance’s media strategy: Stay close to friendly conservative media, tee off with adversarial cable news interviewers, and otherwise pick your spots very carefully.

A hold-over from the 2022 Senate campaign, Schroeder was Vance’s press secretary in the Senate before moving over to the 2024 campaign. Before that, he worked as a junior staffer in the White House Communications Office under Trump. Together with Martin, Vance’s communications director, Schroeder — who is in his late 20s — epitomizes the youthful, insurgent energy of Vance’s closest staff.

A close advisor to Donald Trump Jr., Surabian is a primary conduit between Vance’s political operation and Trump world at Mar-a-Lago. While helping to run Vance's campaign in 2022, he is credited with orchestrating the rapprochement between Vance and Don Jr. that ultimately led to Trump’s endorsement of Vance. Prior to that, he was a key member of Trump’s “war room” during the 2016 campaign and served as a key advisor to Steve Bannon during his stint as Trump’s chief of staff.

The long-time Trump pollster worked closely with Vance’s allied super PAC during the 2022 election and remains close with his political operation. Early in the 2022 campaign, he authored a series of memos arguing that Vance’s reputation as a moderate and “anti-Trump” conservative was seriously harming his electability — and which are credited with pushing Vance to embrace Trump more publicly.

An Ohio-based communications strategist, van Kirk was brought on board after Vance joined the ticket to serve as his traveling press secretary and communications aide. She works closely with William Martin, Vance’s long-time communications director, to set messaging for the campaign. Before working for Vance, she worked as the press secretary for the Ohio speaker of the House and for a crisis communications firm in Washington.

Silicon Valley Donors

A core member of the “PayPal mafia,” the conservative entrepreneur and podcaster rose to prominence on the right railing against “wokeness” and criticizing neoconservative foreign policy on his popular podcast, “All In.” He hopped on the Vance train in 2022 with a $1 million dollar donation to his allied super PAC, and since then, he has become an outspoken supporter of Vance and a key financial backer for Trump. In June, Sacks held a $300,000-a-head fundraising dinner for Trump at his San Francisco mansion, which Vance attended and helped organize, and along with Thiel and Tucker Carlson, he reportedly personally lobbied Trump to pick Vance. Vance has called him “one of my closest confidants” and helped introduce him to Donald Trump Jr.

Musk was a relative latecomer to Vance’s Silicon Valley fan club, but he rallied around Vance in the days before the RNC, reportedly urging Trump in private conversations to pick Vance. Since then, Vance has praised Musk as “a throwback to an older generation of American entrepreneurs [who] builds real things.” Musk has endorsed Trump and reportedly said that he intends to donate $45 million per month to the Trump-Vance campaign until November, though he later denied that figure.

An early Facebook executive turned venture capitalist, Palihapitiya now co-hosts a popular podcast with prominent Vance backer David Sacks and helped Sacks and Vance organize a major Silicon Valley fundraiser in June. He was part of the core Silicon Valley group that backed Vance for vice president, calling Vance “an exceptional pick” after he was selected.

A self-proclaimed “serial entrepreneur” and the head of the venture capital firm “1789 Capital,” Buskirk is leading a pro-Trump super PAC that has committed to spending $45 million on a turnout campaign in swing states. Before Vance entered the Senate, he worked with Buskirk to set up the Rockbridge Network, a network of wealthy pro-Trump donors — including Thiel — to support populist-nationalist candidates. Buskirk is also the publisher of the online conservative journal American Greatness.

Capitol Hill Allies

Lee was the first person to publicly announce Vance — whom he considers a close friend — as Trump’s vice-presidential pick at the Republican National Convention. On Capitol Hill, Vance and Lee spearheaded a Senate hold on all of the Biden administration’s nominees to the Department of Justice to protest the DOJ's role in the indictments of former President Donald Trump. The duo denounced the indictments as “radical lawfare” and “sham proceedings” against Trump.

Cotton has teamed up with Vance on two notable pieces of legislation in the Senate: One bill, co-sponsored by Arizona Democrat Mark Kelly, to boost the number of “shovel-ready” manufacturing sites, and another, introduced in June 2024, to amend the rules surrounding birthright citizenship to exclude the children of undocumented immigrants. They have diverged sharpy on foreign policy, however, with Cotton supporting U.S. aid to Ukraine and Vance opposing it.

Before he was a competitor for Trump’s vice-presidential slot, Rubio worked with Vance on a bill to allow workers to bypass unions when negotiating with their employers. The bill — which was seen as the conservative response to the PRO Act — failed to garner support among Republicans.

The New Right Thinkers

A professor of political theory at the University of Notre Dame, Deneen is the most prominent academic proponent of “postliberalism,” a political philosophy that eschews small-L liberalism’s focus on the protection of individuals’ rights and liberties in favor promoting a “postliberal” order grounded in the promotion of conservative and religious values. Vance has cited Deneen as a major intellectual influence and appeared at events with him, in addition to identifying himself a member of the “postliberal right.”

Hazony, an Israeli-born philosopher and former aide to Benjamin Netenyahu, is the intellectual godfather of the “national conservatism” movement, which formed during the Trump era as a big-tent intellectual movement for the populist-nationalist right. His 2018 book The Virtue of Nationalism is a key text of the nationalist right. Vance has been a regular speaker and attendee at the annual NatCon conference since 2019 and has acknowledged Hazony’s influence on his thinking about nationalism and public religion.

Yarvin is a self-identified monarchist writer and the intellectual leader of the “neo-reactionary” or “NRx” movement, premised on the conviction that American democracy has degenerated into a corrupt oligarchy that will eventually give way to a monarchical “national CEO” or dictator. While blogging under the pseudonym “Mencius Moldbug,” Yarvin dabbled in race science, though he has disavowed white nationalism. Vance has called Yarvin a friend and cited his work in interviews.

Dreher is an orthodox Christian writer who rose to prominence as the leader of the “crunchy cons,” or conservatives who embrace the countercultural, back-to-the-land attitudes typically associated with the hippie left. More recently, he has encouraged Christian conservatives to embrace “the Benedict Option” of withdrawing from mainstream secular society to build self-sustaining communities dedicated to cultivating Christian virtue. (He has moved to Hungary and become a supporter of Viktor Orbán’s government.) He was among the first conservative intellectuals to embrace Vance after the publication of Hillbilly Elegy in 2016 and remains friends with him today, even attending Vance’s baptism into the Catholic Church in 2019.

Cass was an economic policy advisor to Mitt Romney in 2012 before breaking with the GOP’s long-standing consensus on free market fundamentalism to become a leading apostle of the “new conservative economics,” grounded in economic nationalism, protectionism and a nominally “pro-worker” agenda. Vance appears regularly at his think-tank, American Compass, and has cited Cass’s work as a primary influence on his economic thinking.

A veteran of Trump’s Department of Defense, Colby has become the New Right’s go-to foreign policy expert. He describes his own foreign policy position as one of “prioritization,” arguing that the U.S. needs to limit its involvement abroad so it can focus on the unique threat of an ascendent China. Vance has proven to be even more avidly anti-interventionist and skeptical of multilateral institutions like NATO than Colby, but he has cited Colby as an influence, and his public remarks on foreign policy bear the imprint of Colby’s thinking on prioritization.

The MAGA Allies

Vought — the former director of the Office of Management and Budget during the Trump administration and a contender for Trump’s next chief of staff — is a staunch social conservative and a hard-line budget hawk whose organization, the Center for Renewing America, serves as a behind-the-scenes brain trust for the most conservative members of Congress. In January, Vought told POLITICO Magazine that he is in “regular contact” with Vance’s Hill office and that “we probably have one of the closest relationships with [Vance’s] office that we do with any Hill office.”

The former Fox News superstar used his prime-time show to promote Vance’s Senate candidacy in 2022 and has remained one of his most ardent public supporters. Vance is a regular guest on Carlson’s new platform, where the two men have joined forces to oppose additional U.S. aid to Ukraine, and Carlson reportedly personally lobbied Trump to pick Vance as his vice presidential candidate in the days leading up to the Republican National Convention. “He’s by far the smartest and the deepest [senator] I’ve ever met,” Carlson told POLITICO Magazine in January.

The former Trump strategist is another of Vance’s key allies in the conservative media ecosphere, frequently hosting Vance on his show, War Room, and promoting him to his sizable social media following. In an interview with POLITICO Magazine in January, Bannon suggested that Vance could become the “St. Paul” to Trump’s Jesus — the convert who spreads the gospel of Trumpism to the world. “You know, Jesus played the small rooms until St. Paul came around,” Bannon said. “It took the zeal of St. Paul to turn Jesus into a headliner.”

Don Jr. met Vance during his 2022 Senate race and the two men became close friends, with Don Jr. helping broker the rapprochement between Vance and his father that eventually led to Trump’s endorsement. Since then, the two remain “regular texting buddies,” with Vance frequently appearing on Don Jr.’ podcast and Don Jr. serving as one of Vance’s main advocates at Mar-a-Lago. Their friendship paid off during the Republican vice presidential sweepstakes, when Don Jr. publicly and privately advocated for his father to pick Vance, whom he saw as the best candidate to carry forth his father’s legacy.