What Happened to J.D. Vance?

J.D. Vance, the man who, God help us, could be our next vice president, seemed like such a genuine, thoughtful fellow on the night he addressed a crowd of Yale students in a ballroom of the Omni New Haven Hotel at Yale seven years ago.

I was there too, as a columnist for the New Haven Register. I had just finished reading Vance’s best-selling book “Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis” because I was trying to understand how Donald J. Trump had won the presidential election a few months earlier by tapping into the resentment of white, rural American men.

That night was a homecoming of sorts for Vance, who had graduated from Yale Law School four years earlier. He was clean-shaven then; later, as a Republican senator from Ohio and V.P. candidate, he would grow a macho MAGA beard. Good for the image.

Vance entertained the Yalies with some self-deprecating anecdotes about what a “foreign species” he was when he arrived on campus in 2010. There weren’t many other law students from a small, unsophisticated place like Middletown, Ohio.

When he walked into a fancy restaurant in downtown New Haven for a career “networking” dinner, he stared at the fine linens on the table. “They looked softer than my bedsheets. I wanted to touch them without being weird about it.”

He recalled a waitress asked him if he wanted tap water or sparkling water. He opted for the sparkling kind without knowing what it was. “I took one sip and literally spit it out. It was the grossest thing I ever tasted. I told the waitress, ‘Something’s wrong with the water.’”

The next hurdle for this “hillbilly” was ordering wine. When he was asked, “Would you like Sauvignon blanc or Chardonnay?” he thought to himself, “This woman is screwing with me. Stop with the funny French words.” He ended up asking for Chardonnay “because it was easier to pronounce.”

Later in the speech Vance got serious, describing how his grandparents — “Mamaw” and “Papaw” — had raised him because his father had abandoned the family and his mother was an alcoholic who also became addicted to heroin and prescription drugs.

Vance said his grandparents’ love gave him “a fair shot at the American dream.” But he noted, “I saw emotional trauma in my family. I saw police handcuff my mom and take her off in a cruiser.”

Vance disappointed the crowd by saying very little about Trump, who at that point had been in the Oval Office for just 12 days. However, he did say this: “Whether you think he’ll be a great president or the worst ever, we should be mindful that so many people feel left behind. And not just whites. We have a working class immensely unhappy with the direction of our country.”

What happened to J.D. Vance? For years he was a reasonable-sounding Republican moderate. And he was certainly not a Trumpster. “I find him reprehensible,” he wrote on Twitter in 2016, saying Trump had made Muslims in the U.S. afraid. That same year he wrote an op-ed asserting Trump’s proposals “range from immoral to absurd.” Vance described himself as a “never Trump guy.”

Also in 2016, the year Trump was elected president, Vance wrote in The Atlantic magazine that Trump was “cultural heroin.” And in a Facebook message to a former Yale Law School classmate, Vance called Trump “America’s Hitler” and “a cynical asshole.”

Oh, please pardon me for being cynical about Vance. In 2020, anticipating he would need Trump’s support two years later in the U.S. Senate race, Vance endorsed Trump’s re-election bid. Vance later supported Trump’s wacky claim that the 2020 presidential election had been stolen from him

Vance hit his low point in February 2021 when he went down to Mar-a-Lago to genuflect before Trump (he needed his endorsement for that Senate seat) and apologize for all those nasty things he’d said about him. Trump ate it up. He’s gushed about Vance’s “beautiful blue eyes.”

Hey, whatever works! Now here he is, on the ticket with “America’s Hitler” and loving every minute of it. True, he’s off to a rough start. Reporters have uncovered an interview Vance did with Tucker Carlson of Fox News in 2021. This has quickly become known as the “cat ladies” quote.

And here it is, folks: “We’re effectively run in this country, via the Democrats, via our corporate oligarchs, by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable too. And it’s just a basic fact, if you look at Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, A.O.C. — the entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children. And how does it make any sense that we’ve turned our country over to people who don’t really have a direct stake in it?”

There were things to admire about that earnest young man who captivated a crowd of Yale students in a New Haven hotel ballroom seven years ago. But being a best-selling author wasn’t enough for him. His relentless ambition took over and he sold his soul. Yes, to the devil.