This Week in Barrel Scraping: Hillbilly Elegy for Democracy
Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has declared J.D. Vance, author of Hillbilly Elegy and junior senator from Ohio, his VP Elect. Why is Vance famous, and why is he an absolute nightmare for America? Let’s talk about it!
Humor by Alyssa Steinsiek
Hey, I’m writing about U.S. politics for a change!
The latest twist in our upcoming presidential election—which has barely started and is somehow already a nightmare of historical proportions—is Republican candidate and former president Donald Trump announcing his pick for VP: J.D. Vance.
If you’d heard of Vance before Trump named him VP-elect, it was probably because of his annoying ass 2016 memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, and/or the 2020 film adaptation that was nominated for Worst Director, Worst Supporting Actress and Worst Screenplay at the 2021 Golden Raspberry Awards.
Vance fancies himself a rags to riches kind of guy, a working class hero who bootstrapped himself all the way to Yale Law. An article published in the New York Times on Wednesday revealed fascinating details about Vance’s time at Yale, with comments from his former classmates and professors detailing a somewhat bizarre ideological turn from a disgruntled soft conservative to a hardline Republican.
The most important interviewee for the NYT piece, to my mind, is Sofia Nelson.
Nelson was Vance’s classmate at Yale, one of a dozen odd students assigned study group for an entire year, and once a close friend of Vance and his wife Usha. Nelson is also transgender, and apparently when they had top surgery, Vance delivered homemade baked goods to them. That idea is hard to square with the man who J.D. Vance is today, whose history of anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric and legislative work has been thoroughly documented by both the Human Rights Campaign and GLAAD. That’s probably why Nelson says they ended their friendship with the Vances after J.D. supported an Arkansas ban on gender-affirming care for trans kids.
Vance is, indisputably, an absolute powerhouse of a MAGA senator. He’s everything a guy like Trump wants in a Vice President, unlike his deeply religious former VP Mike Pence, who refused to endorse Trump back in March. Vance has accused supporters of trans youth of “sexualizing” minors, believes that sexual orientation and gender identity should not be protected by non-discrimination laws, and rebutted the idea of abortion rights for victims of sexual assault by saying “two wrongs don’t make a right.”
It’s not hard to see why J.D.’s mother wanted to trade him for a handful of Perc 30s.
The man is a scumbag. Nobody in their right mind would dispute that. The exact nature of his scumbaggery fascinates me, though; the NYT article about Vance, as previously mentioned, characterizes his personal beliefs as shifting over a period of time. There is, in fact, fantastic evidence of this very abrupt change of heart.
In 2022, Georgia State Senator Josh McLauren revealed that in 2016 Vance messaged him about Trump, whom he described as “America’s Hitler.” He described Trump as an “idiot,” “noxious,” and “reprehensible” in long since deleted Tweets. In Vance’s claim to fame, a masturbatory autobiography meant to explain why ignorant Appalachians might vote Trump into office despite his clear disdain for them, he never names the former President… but in interviews he gave after the book’s release, Vance wasn’t particularly shy about shit talking the man.
Like many of Trump’s pre-2016 detractors in the Republican party, Vance changed his tune once Trump was in power and he wanted something from him. In Vance’s case, he wanted Trump’s blessing for the 2022 Ohio senate race, so he miraculously transformed from critic to supporter, perhaps hoping nobody would notice.
They did. Anybody who knows anything about Vance knows he’s a mealymouthed sycophant. Unfortunately, that knowledge doesn’t make him any less dangerous, and it may not even keep him out of the White House.
I’ll let you in on a secret: I grew up in Appalachia, too. In, arguably, an even poorer, more racially isolated place than J.D. Vance. Though my memoirs are not forthcoming, I will tell you that I have never felt compelled to support fascism or betray minority Americans to win a seat in congress. My mother struggled with addiction and the carceral system for most of my youth, and it only imbued me with empathy and compassion for victims of drug addiction and our deeply racist, inhumane prison complex.
If you ask me, J.D. doesn’t have an excuse. He’s just a fucking asshole.
Alyssa Steinsiek is a professional writer who spends too much time playing video games!
