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.”