Amid U.S. President Donald Trump's 2024 election campaign, a rumor spread online that U.S. Vice President JD Vance's grandmother once set his grandfather on fire. Social media users made the claim on X and Facebook.
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Several posts referenced Vance's own autobiographical book, "Hillbilly Elegy," as their source.
(Twitter)
It is true that Vance's book includes an anecdote about his grandmother setting his grandfather on fire. Vance also discusses this story in a filmed interview, where he said a family member told him he got one detail wrong: the type of fluid his grandmother used to set his grandfather on fire.
Here's the anecdote as told in "Hillbilly Elegy" on page 43:
Mamaw told Papaw after a particularly violent night of drinking that if he ever came home drunk again, she'd kill him. A week later, he came home drunk again and fell asleep on the couch. Mamaw, never one to tell a lie, calmly retrieved a gasoline canister from the garage, poured it all over her husband, lit a match, and dropped it on his chest. When Papaw burst into flames, their eleven-year-old daughter jumped into action to put out the fire and save his life. Miraculously, Papaw survived the episode with only mild burns.
On page 23, Vance wrote that "Mamaw" and "Papaw" are what he calls his grandparents:
Other people have all kinds of names for their grandparents: grandpa, nanna, pop-pop, grannie, and so on. Yet I've never heard anyone say "Mamaw"—pronounced ma'am-aw—or "Papaw" outside of our community. These names belong only to hillbilly grandparents. My grandparents—Mamaw and Papaw— were, without question or qualification, the best thing that ever happened to me.
Of course, Vance's telling of the story doesn't mean that the event actually happened, and Snopes can't verify whether it did, as his maternal grandparents at the center of this anecdote, James and Bonnie Vance, are both deceased.
However, Snopes could find no news reports of members of the vice president's family disputing his version of events — other than a filmed interview (see 1:21) Vance did with the Hoover Institution where he said that a family member told him it was lighter fluid, not gasoline, that his grandmother used to set his grandfather on fire (emphasis ours):
Interviewer: Your grandmother, Mamaw, once told your grandfather, Papaw, that if he ever came home drunk again, she'd kill him. He did, and she almost did. Tell us that story.
Vance: Yeah, that's right. So, she...when he came home drunk, he passed out on the couch, and my grandmother was not one for sort of taking things lying down, so she decided she was going to honor her word. And she poured gasoline on him, as I write in the book, and lit a match to him, and he sort of, part of him caught on fire. It was my aunt, who at the time was 11 or 12 years old, who saved him from potentially burning to death. It's funny or maybe just morbid, but I think a little bit of both, that when I was talking with family later, someone said 'you know, JD, I think maybe you didn't get that story quite right.' I think, oh no, what detail have I messed up that I put in the book. And he said, 'I think it was lighter fluid, not gasoline.' And so there's some debate on what the actual substance was.