Republican vice-presidential nominee J.D. Vance speaks during a campaign rally in Newtown, Pa., on Sept. 28.Laurence Kesterson/The Associated Press
The broad understanding of J.D. Vance’s personal road map to the vice-presidential debate stage – where he’ll face off against Tim Walz on Tuesday night – is that he is a shameless turncoat who swallowed whole his deeply felt criticisms of Donald Trump when he sensed the winds shift.
Indeed, before he became Mr. Trump’s running mate and attack dog, Mr. Vance had a long, cutting and colourful history of diagnosing everything he saw wrong with Trumpism.
In private conversations, he described Mr. Trump as a “moral disaster” and “America’s Hitler.” In public, he called him “reprehensible” and argued he was cynically exploiting alienated people he had no intention of helping.
A few months before the 2016 election, Mr. Vance wrote a piece for The Atlantic calling him “cultural heroin,” writing, “What Trump offers is an easy escape from the pain. To every complex problem, he promises a simple solution.”
The reason Mr. Vance’s criticisms of the Republican presidential candidate carried weight then – why everyone knew his name and cared what he thought – was his 2016 bestseller Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis.
Published at the perfect moment, months before Mr. Trump was elected president, Mr. Vance’s book was at first adored by left and right alike as a nuanced insider study of the neglected parts of the country and socioeconomic spectrum where Trumpism bloomed. Before long, however, the book was criticized as opportunistic, myopic or a lurid caricature masquerading as compassionate cultural examination.
But whatever its successes or weaknesses, the book is an unusually deep self-portrait of a man who rocketed to national political prominence in dizzying short order, and who is at this moment an electoral coin toss away from the vice-presidency.
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And what Hillbilly Elegy illuminates is that Mr. Vance is not a turncoat but a shape-shifter. He always has been, because it’s how he survived the life he laid out in his book.
Being a turncoat implies that you were authentically one thing, then shucked it off to become its opposite when that was more advantageous. Mr. Vance, on the other hand, relates a life story in which his survival skill was to constantly pour himself into whatever vessel was available to help him get by.
The childhood and family history Mr. Vance recounts were jagged with instability: domestic violence, alcoholism, drug addiction, poverty, the sort of constant chaos where children become their own adults because they can’t count on the real grown-ups.
At one point, Mr. Vance explains that his mother’s “revolving door” of romantic interests taught him to play different characters to connect. With Steve, the guy in midlife crisis mode, young J.D. pretended to think earrings were cool; with Chip, the macho police officer, he faked a love of cars; with Ken, the awkward guy who proposed to his mom after a few days of dating, he was a kind big brother to his two young kids.
“But none of these things were really true. I hated earrings, I hated police cars and I knew Ken’s children would be out of my life by the next year,” Mr. Vance writes. One of the central themes of the book is the displacement of his everyday life in Ohio contrasted with his time spent in Kentucky, where his family’s roots were, and where “I didn’t have to pretend to be someone I wasn’t.”
Even Mr. Vance’s name changed repeatedly. First he was James Donald Bowman, with his middle and surname from his biological dad. After his mother’s third husband adopted him, she changed his name to James David Hamel to excise his biological dad’s first name and give her son his adoptive dad’s surname.
Mr. Vance writes that when he married his wife, Usha, in 2014, “we both changed our name to Vance – giving me, finally, the same name as the family to which I belonged.” But when the Associated Press set out to explain his various identities, his spokesperson said he had in fact changed his surname in 2013, when he finished law school at Yale.
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Of launching into a new life of assumed privilege, Mr. Vance writes about constantly feeling sweatily out of place, and of faking his way through until he absorbed the unspoken rules (wear a suit to job interviews, but not one three sizes too big for you).
The entire book is shot through with the sense of a child, then a teenager and then a man who faced constant scarcity, volatility and shame. And the way he dealt with it was to wriggle himself into the cracks between the floorboards and observe each scene around him long enough for his very sharp brain to figure out which guise would get him through the moment.
And so you have the journey from Mr. Trump as cultural cancer to the one true hero for forgotten Americans. That’s why you snipe about childless cat ladies, and call for calmer rhetoric in the same breath that you accuse your opponents of loading up an assassin’s bullet.
It’s how you look directly into a news camera and claim the moral high ground in lying about refugees eating people’s pets, because you insist you’re really highlighting the plight of your constituents.
This constant shape-shifting gives Mr. Vance one more very interesting function in American politics, beyond the present moment.
At some point between 2016 and 2022, when he won his Senate race in Ohio thanks to Mr. Trump’s backing, he sensed that being with Donald Trump was more profitable than being against him.
So in contemplating when and how and why Mr. Trump’s greasy chokehold on American politics might falter, Mr. Vance will be a very useful weather vane.
When J.D. Vance pours his liquid self into some other shape, some new direction, that’s when you’ll know something has changed.