JD Vance emerged as a media darling with Hillbilly Elegy, his best-selling 2016 memoir of growing up poor in Ohio. But that’s just one of several hats he’s worn—Yale-trained lawyer, Silicon Valley venture capitalist, Never Trump pundit, pro-Trump senator, and vice president of the United States—all by the age of 40. On this episode, host and Vanity Fair editor in chief Radhika Jones is joined by executive editor Claire Howorth and Hive editor Michael Calderone to trace Vance’s populist ride through America’s power centers and how his right-wing ideology plays into a burgeoning constitutional crisis. They also discuss Vance’s role so far as Trump’s veep—and whether he has the political chops to one day land the top job.
When Vance was first announced as Trump’s running mate back in July, liberals feasted on all the hullaballoo about his “childless cat ladies” comment and his Never Trump past. Some saw it as a rough start. But at the time, Howorth argues, Democrats were missing the forest for the trees. “I don’t think that the right was seeing that or laughing about that or thinking he was making gaffes at all,” she says. “I think he totally had followers then, and it was to the left’s own detriment that they thought it was all goofy. I think he is yet another avatar for all the young dudes who are looking for their masculine energy. And I think he really understands the intellectual game. He gets the ground game.”
On the campaign trail, Vance eventually proved himself a formidable operator for Donald Trump, be it in media interviews, debates, and social media shitposts. As a canny writer and orator, Vance “is playing the lawyer to Trump’s showman and Elon Musk’s bull in a china shop,” says Jones. “He positions himself as the one who is a scholar, who is, by comparison, restrained. But I’m starting to think that we underestimate the power of JD Vance at our own peril. And given that the vice presidency is sort of a joked about position—it literally takes a backseat to the presidency—I’m curious about how he will take that position and make something of it. He is, compared to Trump, compared to a lot of powerful Republicans, a young man.”
Underestimated or not, Vance is clearly positioning himself as one of the future torchbearers of the MAGA movement—and one willing to buck all sorts of democratic norms to advance the cause. Case in point: Just this past weekend, after two courts ruled against Trump’s federal funding moves, he claimed, wildly, that “judges aren’t allowed to control” the president’s “legitimate power,” in what essentially amounts to giving the Constitution the middle finger. “When you look at the trajectory of the Republican Party, these are their ideas that the conventional establishment Republican Party probably would have thought were too wild,” argued Calderone. “JD Vance seems to be somebody who believes we should get ‘wild’ and see what happens.”
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The post Shillbilly Elegy: How JD Vance Became a Winning Spokesman for MAGA’s Darkest Machinations appeared first on Vanity Fair.
