Opinion | J.D. Vance on Where He’d Take the Republican Party - The New York Times

In 2016, J.D. Vance’s best-selling memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy,” made him one of America’s leading interpreters of Trumpism, offering a personal narrative of populism’s origins in working-class disarray. In 2024, as a first-term United States senator from Ohio, Vance is arguably America’s leading Trumpist: a staunch ally of Donald Trump, a leading critic of the establishment consensus (or what remains of it) in both foreign and domestic politics, a potential vice-presidential candidate and a likely populist agenda-setter for a second Trump term. The Vance of eight years ago was read with appreciation and gratitude by Trump opponents looking for a window into populism. The Vance of today is despised and feared by many of the same kind of people. His transformation is one of the most striking political stories of the Trump era, and one that’s likely to influence Republican politics even after Trump is gone. I've known Vance since before he assumed either of these identities. For this conver

In 2016, J.D. Vance’s best-selling memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy,” made him one of America’s leading interpreters of Trumpism, offering a personal narrative of populism’s origins in working-class disarray. In 2024, as a first-term United States senator from Ohio, Vance is arguably America’s leading Trumpist: a staunch ally of Donald Trump, a leading critic of the establishment consensus (or what remains of it) in both foreign and domestic politics, a potential vice-presidential candidate and a likely populist agenda-setter for a second Trump term. The Vance of eight years ago was read with apprecia