Hillbilly Nation

Hillbilly Nation

You know where this is going more than I know where it’s going. I am perplexed and trying to make sense in the broadest possible way with the announcement that J.D. Vance is not only Donald Trump’s last-minute Vice Presidential pick, but that he has suddenly been elevated at age 39 to the national political stage and characterized by none less than Nate Cohn of the New York Times as the future leader of the MAGA movement and top contender for the presidency in 2028. That is simply a lot to digest in as many different directions as I can imagine. We have all known for a long time that Donald Trump is no ideologue, but is more than a little transactional in his politics. He says and does whatever his instincts tell him is in his own best interest at the moment. Make no mistake about it, that is a valuable learned skill for a person like Trump and unlike many more accomplished and bootstrapped people, Trump has put in well more than his 10,000 Malcolm Gladstone hours learning how to shuck and jive for his own best interests. It may actually be his defining characteristic in the way that whatever a chameleon may do in its life, it will be remembered for its ability to adjust its look to its surroundings. J.D. Vance certainly has some of that capability as he has shown in his pivot towards Trumpism, but he is quite a bit more complex than that because there is a strong bootstrap element to him and a very strange blend of the hillbilly and the Ivy Leaguer.

I have said for a long time that I find it less strange that more than 40% of our nation wants to support a person with autocratic tendencies than it is that they would choose someone like Trump to be their demigod. I know that history has proven that the strangest and most unlikely of men tend to rise to power at times of existential uncertainty. I’m not sure we all know enough about who Genghis Khan or Alexander the Great were as human beings the way we do about Benito Mussolini or Adolf Hitler, so this reasoning about Trump’s leadership may not be as universal as it is bespoke. Thinking people tend to overthink and I know I am prone to that problem, but big political moves get harder and harder to ignore when the stakes seem so high for the normalcy of our nation and world. Trump is, indeed, both a very strange choice for America and a very predictable choice for America depending on how cynical you are feeling at the moment. Trump’s patent and proven lack of academic or business capability is, by now, very well known. His flamboyant and narcissistic manner are sickeningly on display 24×7. There is nothing about his intelligence or fundamental character to commend him. But he is also smart like a fox and has enough emotional intelligence to keep getting away with murder over and over again, all while claiming the moral high-ground of victimhood. It is intellectually dishonest and yet tactically brilliant. And at this point it would be hard not to say that it is all very innate to him. Whatever he is, it all comes naturally. If a bullet through his ear doesn’t rattle him, nothing is likely to do so.

But J.D. Vance is decidedly not Donald Trump, no matter how much he tries to mimic the boss. I recall reading his now-famous book, Hillbilly Elegy, and having a degree of admiration for how he pulled himself up from his hillbilly roots to go on to law school at Yale. By the same token, I recall being a little bit put off by some of the things he did in moving himself forward. A few years later, when the movie came out, I noted that while I almost always love Ron Howard movies, not so with Hillbilly Elegy. It certainly didn’t make the cut as a favorite movie. The reality and the screen depiction of what his hardscrabble life was like brought less sympathy than in the reading, and the realities of the dark side of that upbringing came through much stronger than I expected. I wonder how Ron Howard feels now about that movie given this most recent event.

I find it interesting that Republicans are making a big deal out of Vance’s four-year stint after high school in the Marine Corps. The stories have already come out that he was such a bad shot that he got assigned to work in PR and that while he was deployed to Iraq, it was hardly a front line assignment. It is like so many things I find about Vance’s background. They are somewhat impressive, but still not quite so much in reality…

I was aware that JD Vance went to work in the venture capital space for a few years, first getting into league with Peter Thiel at Mithras Capital and then with Steve Case of AOL fame at his portentously named firm, Revolution. He then went back to his roots in Cincinnati, Ohio and co-founded Narya Ventures, which he left to run for the Senate in 2022. So, while the VC experience gave him access to what have become big conservative supporters like Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen and Eric Schmidt, his VC efforts per se were not particularly noteworthy one way or the other in a financial sense. It is also noteworthy that as he returned to Cincinnati and prepared for his Senate run, he launched a 501(c)4 charity/advocacy platform to help education about addiction, only to be accused of using it as a political front and closing it without any noteworthy successes. This is starting to look like a pattern. It all leads me to believe that J.D. Vance seems to be blazing a path from hillbilly to law student (Yale Law Journal) to lawyer (Sidley Austin for a brief shining moment) to bestselling author, to venture capitalist to philanthropist to Senator to Veep Candidate. What exactly is that pattern? It looks to me like that of a dilettante that may be intelligent, but may also be more focused on self-aggrandizement than actually creating anything successful or lasting. In other words, he may be the perfect foil for Donald Trump.

The one thing that he can claim as post-graduate accomplishment is the success of Hillbilly Elegy. It seems interesting that when it came out in 2016, The New York Times called it “one of the six best books to help understand Trump’s win”, since it dug into the whole arena of white trash America, where Trump has such a stranglehold on his base from there. Meanwhile, The New Republic denigrated the book and called it “liberal media’s favorite white trash-splainer” and the “false prophet of blue America.” In many ways, it was his biographical book that stood on the shoulders of his humble beginnings that set the stage for his rise to prominence, collecting both supporters and detractors along the way and grooming his image as the perfect match-up for Donald Trump. These two imposters are quite different.

When I went to look up J.D. Vance to better understand him, I was surprised to see that he was born James Donald Bowman, and then changed his name to that of his step father, becoming James David Hamel (presumably distancing himself from his father, Donald Ray Bowman, as much as he could with a middle and last name change). After Law School and on the occasion of his marriage, he changed his name to Vance, the name of his maternal grandparents, who raised him and were his guardians in his Hillbilly days.

Probably the most notable political thing about J.D. Vance is how outspoken he was in 2016 about Donald Trump, calling him, among other things, “America’s Hitler”. His extreme sycophancy towards Trump at this stage is the subject of a great deal of humor running rampant today. Now that I know more about the man and the path he has taken through life, I think it is easier to understand the imposter/chameleon description and to suggest that there is no way this man should or even can rise to become the President of the United States. I know people will say that if Trump could, Vance can, but I don’t think lightning keeps striking the same spot, so my money is on whomever runs against J.D. Vance, now or in 2028. We may be a Hillbilly Nation, but we are also known to wake up to a fraud sooner or later.