The only reason anybody ever heard of JD Vance is because he decided to write about how butthurt he was over people he claimed were on food stamps talking on cell phones in his grocery-store checkout line.
That guy, who rose to literary prominence by convincing The New York Times that the mythical welfare queen explains the appeal of Donald Trump to MAGA voters, is now the Republican Party vice-presidential nominee.
What a country.
Before we get there, though, Vance, who actually grew up in Middletown, Ohio, which is not Appalachia, despite what you were led to believe, but is, in fact, a city of 51,000, with a median income above the state and national averages, had to undergo some rather dramatic personal transformations.
The part about becoming a populist with an Ivy League degree isn’t all that difficult. Trump himself pretends to be a populist with his; ditto for Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, Ron DeSantis, Elise Stefanik.
No, the hard part for Vance is that, at the outset of his rise to whatever prominence he can claim to be at now, he pretended to be a Never Trumper; that, or he actually is a Never Trumper, and is just now pretending that he’s not.
(It’s the latter.)
This was a text message to his former law-school roommate: “I go back and forth between thinking Trump is a cynical asshole like Nixon who wouldn’t be that bad (and might even prove useful) or that he’s America’s Hitler. How’s that for discouraging?”
In an 2016 interview promoting his book on NPR (shudder that thought now, amirite?), he had this to say about how he was planning to vote in the presidential election: “You know, I think there’s a chance, if I feel like Trump has a really good chance of winning, that I might have to hold my nose and vote for Hillary Clinton. But at the end of the day, I just feel like she is so culturally disconnected from the people that I grew up around that it would be very, very hard for me to cast my ballot for her. So ultimately, I think I’ll probably vote third party. I might vote for this new guy who I really like, Evan McMullin, who I actually met the other day. But I think that I’m going to vote third party because I can’t stomach Trump. I think that he’s noxious and is leading the white working class to a very dark place.”
To close that end, Vance revealed in 2018 that he had, in fact, voted for a third-party candidate in 2016.
He told Charlie Rose in another 2016 interview that he was a “Never Trump guy,” in case you were wondering why I called him that; I was just quoting JD Vance there.
From there, we fast-forward to the 2022 Ohio Republican Senate primary, by which time he had repented for his sins against Trump, that or he had ambition beyond being the favorite Never Trump conservative of Midtown Manhattan liberals, and the only way to get anywhere in the Republican Party of the here and now is to bend the knee to Trump.
So, he lobbied TrumpWorld, hard, for more than a year, the biggest W from that effort being getting the backing of Donald Jr., who also backed Vance in the recent veepstakes, and publicly prostrated himself as an ardent advocate of the Big Lie, that the 2020 election was rigged.
Even after getting Trump’s endorsement in that 2022 race, the big guy with the long tie humiliated Vance at a September campaign rally, telling the assembled crowd that “JD is kissing my ass, he wants my support so bad,” and Vance, of course, proved him right, because he didn’t say a word in response.
Now we’re supposed to think that this Ivy grad/New York Times bestselling author/freshman senator is going to be a MAGA populist game-changer on the campaign trail.
This guy, whose balls Trump has in his front pocket, and is now Trump’s running mate because he has demonstrated that he can repeat the Big Lie, and that his Never Trump lips will kiss as much noxious Trump ass as he needs to kiss.
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Chris Graham
