JD Vance’s version of politics, according to Hillbilly Elegy

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It’s a story — young memoirist with an Ivy League law degree tells a compelling story, catapults into the Senate and joins the national political conversation — familiar to anyone who followed the career of Barack Obama.

But instead of Obama, the memoirist of the moment is JD Vance, the Republican senator from Ohio, who has been tapped by former President Donald Trump as his vice presidential running mate and, at 39, the next generation of the MAGA movement.

Vance’s book, like Obama’s, is about a young man largely raised by his grandparents and overcoming themes of alienation. Vance’s“Hillbilly Elegy” was also turned into a Ron Howard movie.

“Hillbilly Elegy” caused a sensation after Trump’s election in 2016 as people tried to understand how Democrat Hillary Clinton had lost the Rust Belt states. The book, with touching stories about Vance’s upbringing, his drug-addicted mother and his foul-mouthed, gun-toting grandmother, attempts to explain the disaffection of the white, working-class Americans who felt like American society was passing them by as they witnessed the decay of once-thriving towns.

Vance has clearly evolved since the book’s publication. He opposed Trump when it was first published just before the 2016 election and is now on the same presidential ticket, a full-fledged Trump acolyte.

Trump’s and Vance’s stories are about as opposite as it is possible for the stories of two white men to be.

Trump built his business career with loans from his father. Vance dropped his biological father’s name, Donald, to simply become JD.

Trump was born