The Atlantic writer George Packer calls JD Vance the most interesting figure in the Trump administration: "He's capable of complex thought, and I also think he may be the future of the MAGA movement."Also, David Bianculli reviews the HBO movie Mountainhead, written by Succession writer/creator Jesse Armstrong.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy
Chapter 1: Who is J.D. Vance and why is he significant?
He was not only trying to find himself, but he was trying to remake himself as someone who had come out of this small and, as he says in Hillbilly Elegy, rather hopeless world. Which he remained very attached. He didn't cut himself off from Middletown, Ohio or eastern Kentucky. He stayed close to his sister, to his friends, to his grandparents and even on and off to his very troubled mother.
But he was getting away. And he says in one of his essays – and he's left quite a long written trail. He says that at that time, he lost his Christian faith. and became an atheist and a libertarian. And he says those belief systems were convenient for the world he was trying to get into. They were quite acceptable in the elite world of the Ivy League. There were a lot of atheists.
And if you were a conservative, to be a libertarian was sort of like being an acceptable conservative, whereas being maybe a social conservative was a little harder to justify. Yeah.
Did you find or learn from anyone you talked to any contradictions between the man that he describes himself as in Hillbilly Elegy and some of the realities that people responded to once that book came out?
Well, one thing I heard from several friends of his from Yale was that they were surprised by the degree of trauma and deprivation he described in Hillbilly Elegy. They weren't the poorest of the poor, but they were poor people who few of whom had regular jobs. And his mother had a series of partners who cycled through and none of them seemed to be particularly interested in her young son, J.D.,
And his mother began to take prescription drugs and then finally heroin. So this was a tough background. And his friends in New Haven really didn't quite know how bad it had been. He didn't advertise it. And the other thing was they said, you wouldn't have known that he was in any way disadvantaged by his background. He came into Yale and was immediately popular, charismatic, humorous.
intelligent. As one friend said, not having gone to Harvard or Yale as an undergraduate did not seem to make any difference in his ability to succeed.
As you mentioned, J.D. Vance went to Ohio State University. He went on to Yale Law School. That time at Yale was a transformative time. He arrived there and made friends very quickly, was very popular, as you stated, He also met his wife, who is now the second lady, whom he called his life coach. Can you remind us of her background and how she helped him navigate that world?
Yeah, he called her his Yale spirit guide. Her name was Usha Chilukuri when he met her. She is the daughter of immigrants from India, from southern India, Hindu immigrants, who settled in southern California and rose quickly to become very successful academics. And Usha was one of these...
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Chapter 2: What contradictions define J.D. Vance's character?
his world, which was about to become the world of Trump voters, to the elites who came to the Aspen Ideas Festival and the Sun Valley conferences and went out to dinner with CEOs and celebrities. And that was his ticket to fame, but it was a kind of tarnished ticket because what's he doing? He's telling these...
sort of curious, but also rather smug and complacent people, why his people have these pathologies. And these things stuck with Vance while he was on this circuit. And later, I think he used them and maybe even exaggerated them a little bit to justify his turning against this class that he had fought so hard to join.
The thing about Hillbilly Elegy, I mean, I want you to delve a little bit deeper into this because you write, while that memoir really did speak to his life in really deep and profound ways in the lives of many, many people, the memoir belongs in an era that no longer exists. Can you say more about that?
Yeah. So, Tanya, it came out in the summer of 2016. And at the beginning, like many memoirs by completely unknown writers, it went nowhere. And then through an interview and then maybe another interview, it began to catch on with certain readers. And then on election night— 2016.
Vance is in a studio of Yahoo News, not the prime place to be, but he's already become kind of an informant on the world of Trump voters. And suddenly Trump is winning.
An informant because he's speaking. He's speaking about the working class through his own experiences.
Exactly. The interviewers assume that that the people Vance grew up with are Trump voters. And that's actually a fair assumption. And so they want him. There are not that many people at that point who can be considered what anthropologists call native informants, people who can speak from their own authentic experience about a whole tribe.
And suddenly he's in demand because this tribe seems to have come out of nowhere to elect Donald Trump. And that night, ABC News says, we need J.D. Vance to explain this. So they pull him into their main studio and George Stephanopoulos is sort of almost begging him to explain them. What do they want? Why are they voting for him? And Vance is sort of careful not to say too much.
But so suddenly he is one of the most visible people. Not on behalf of Trump because, interestingly, he himself despised Trump at that point. He wrote in The Atlantic, my magazine, that Trump was cultural heroin, this irresistibly addictive drug. drug that would end up destroying his people, Vance's people.
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