When Nate heard his cousin, U.S. Vice President JD Vance, attack Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in the White House’s Oval Office, he flew into a rage. In his camper van, lost on the roads of the American West that he has been crisscrossing since he came back from Ukraine in January 2025, Nate was disappointed. He felt let down by his younger cousin — JD is a few years younger than Nate, who is 47 — whose integrity he had always defended.
“JD is a good guy, intelligent,” Nate says. “When he criticized aid to Ukraine, I told myself that it was because he had to please a certain electorate and that it was a political game. But what they did to Zelensky [with Donald Trump, Editor’s note] was an ambush of absolute bad faith.”
Nate and JD share grandparents: JD’s mother, Beverly, is the sister of Nate’s father, James. The two men spent vacations together with JD’s family in Middletown, Ohio, or in California, where Nate’s family briefly lived. JD Vance saw his career take off in 2016 when…
