Angsty Personal Blog Reveals ‘Lonely’ Past Life of 20-Year-Old J.D. Vance

Donald Trump’s running mate, Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH), waxed poetic about the Zach Braff movie Garden State, shared his musings about the meaning of home, and posted emotional updates from the months before he was deployed to the Middle East on a personal blog verified by the Daily Beast.

The site, titled “The Ruminations of J.D. Hamel”—Vance’s name before he officially had it changed after his wedding in 2014—was hosted on the popular early-internet site Blogger and is connected via a profile to a previously reported political blog penned by Vance called “The Hillbilly Elite.”

The blog was launched in 2005, just before Vance was shipped off to Iraq to serve as a public relations specialist in the Marine Corps. In it, the future veep candidate said he spent his final days before his deployment reading a biography on Winston Churchill and his Bible. He also cried a lot, according to one post, the first time he had done so since his grandmother recently died.

Read more at The Daily Beast.