JD Vance, Much Like Trump, Is A Media Creation

Much as I can’t stand a hypocrite, I have never found the hoopla over JD Vance’s evolution on Donald Trump to be all that particularly compelling a topic. 

I know that Vance once called himself a “Never Trump guy,” described Trump as “America’s Hitler,” “cultural heroin,” an “idiot,” “noxious” and “reprehensible.”

Yet when it comes to Trump’s hostile takeover of the GOP, Vance’s shift, rooted in ambition, is not especially novel. If anything, his transition from Trump political foe to running mate was not only inevitable but predictable the moment he first filed to run as a Republican. 

What does interest me about Vance’s political ascension, however, is how the (“liberal”) media helped make him the most natural successor to the MAGA movement. I agree with writer Osita Nwanevu that it should “never be forgotten.” While I admittedly never quite sat down and read Vance’s memoir, ”Hillbilly Elegy,” in full, I read enough of it and saw enough of the press surrounding it and him to understand what he was selling.

Not to discount the appeal of his journey from being a young man raised by his grandparents to becoming a Marine, Yale Law School graduate and successful venture capitalist, but much of Vance’s appeal centered on the notion of him explaining poor white people to rich white elites in ways most reassuring to their already held beliefs about po’ folk. 

Donald Trump Jr., who pushed his father to choose Vance as his running mate, was an admitted big fan of ”Hillbilly Elegy” back in 2016. Sure, but the people who really elevated the book and Vance at its peak were not Republicans. It was The New York Times that called the book “a compassionate, discerning sociological analysis of the white underclass.” Other elite media institutions such as The New Yorker, were no less favorable to Vance. On television, President Joe Biden’s favorite morning news show, MSNBC’s ”Morning Joe,” helped elevate Vance, too.

Then there are fancy folks like Larry Summers, former treasury secretary under Bill Clinton and president of Harvard, who tweeted: “Anyone wanting to understand Trump’s rise or American inequality should read it.” 

The fanfare led to Vance becoming a mainstay on TV and turning himself into a celebrity pundit during the 2016 presidential campaign. It’s no coincidence that the week of Trump’s 2017 inauguration, ”Hillbilly Elegy”sat atopthe New York Times nonfiction bestseller list. Some years later came the Netflix adaptation, a movie that intended to be Oscar bait but ended up widely panned as critics like the A.V. Club’s Katie Rife dismissed it as “bootstrapping poverty porn” that “reinforces the stereotypes it insists it’s illuminating.”

Sounds like Hollywood to me, but to be fair to some of the book’s critics, they made similar complaints about the source material only to be drowned out by the cheers of much of the mainstream press. The New Republic’s Sarah Jones referred to Vance as “the False Prophet of Blue America.” Separately, Jared Yates Sexton, an author and political journalist who, like Vance, grew up in the midwest, criticized the book in an interview with Salon. 

“JD Vance has spent the past few years sanitizing right-wing appeals and camouflaging white supremacist-pandering,” Sexton said at the time.

Meanwhile, another midwesterner, Lisa R. Pruitt, Professor of Law at the University of California, Davis, who has written extensively about rurality, whiteness, and class, also took issue with ”Hillbilly Elegy,” referring to “Vance’s use of what was ostensibly a memoir to support ill-informed policy prescriptions” in a column.

It always felt obvious to me that Vance was using this book to potentially soft-launch a political career, but not everyone around him recognized that. Ron Howard, who directed the ”Hillbilly Elegy” adaptation, told Variety in 2022 about Vance’s interest in politics:  “At the time I was working with him he was concentrating on starting his family and he was becoming a businessman and I asked him about it, he said, ‘Maybe somebody down the road.’ Someday came a little sooner than any of us expected.”

As for his embrace of Trump, Howard said, “To be honest, I was surprised,” noting, “To me, he struck me as a very moderate center-right kind of guy.”

Howard said the two never discussed politics directly, but what Vance says about working-class white people in the book is quite political in nature to me. Following his selection as Trump’s VP, Sam Workman, a professor of political science at West Virginia University, described the book as “poverty porn” in an interview with The Associated Press.

Workman argued that the reception to the book has more to say about the disconnect between intellectual pundits in academics, politics, the media and rural working-class people than anything else.

“‘Hillbilly Elegy’ was so popular at the start, and all of a sudden everyone now dislikes it, because they realize the rabbit’s out of the hat in a way,” Workman explained. “This is really about a lot of liberal intellectuals being caught off guard as to what the real purposes of ‘Hillbilly Elegy’ were. It was the first foray into a really potent, conservative political career.”

Such is the presumed root of the obsession behind Vance’s alleged hypocrisy in his embrace of Trump. But for all the clips I see on TV and online showing Vance morphing from Trump antagonizer to cheerleader, I don’t see many featuring the people and institutions responsible for Vance potentially being the first millennial vice president. Not just Fox, but the supposed liberal cable news channels, the Hollywood studios, and the upper echelon of political media. Y’all boosted him and that book in ways not afforded to most authors — certainly not the Black ones.

Vance is a man of contradiction, but hasn’t that been as true of him as an author as it is as a politician? It’s also true of Trump, but what they lack in consistent ideology, they make up for in nationalism, being for the rich and sounding kinda racist on occasion. For what it’s worth, I don’t know JD Vance, but when asked about his shift, Georgia state Sen. Josh McLaurin (D) — the former law school roommate who had received Vance’s “America’s Hitler” text — offered what sounds like a plausible explanation for Vance’s turn.

“The through line between former JD and current JD is anger,” McLaurin told Vox. “The Trump turn can be understood as a lock-in on contempt as the answer to anger” — and in Vance’s case, contempt directed at his political enemies.

Much like Trump, though the consumption of right wing media may have radicalized him, Vance’s political career does not launch in the conservative media ecosystem but by way of a book widely lauded and publicized by liberal institutions.

And like Trump, Vance may talk about his enemies — elites, liberals, etc. — but he has them to thank for his rise. From Peter Thiel to Hollywood to far too many media outlets based in New York City.

It’s no wonder that when Donald Trump sees Vance, he reportedly thinks, “You are one handsome son-of-a-bitch.” Vance is not my type — politically or otherwise — but from Trump’s vantage point, I can see the appeal. It may not have seemed like an immediate fit, but in many ways, Trump’s found the perfect political scion — and we can all fault the same people for both their rises.