Today, Explained - Trumpbilly Elegy

Episode Date: April 29, 2022

Liberals turned to J.D. Vance’s book to better understand Donald Trump’s victory. Now the “Hillbilly Elegy” author is turning to Trump to try and win the Republican primary in Ohio’s Senate race. This episode was produced by Victoria Chamberlin, edited by Matt Collette, engineered by Efim Shapiro, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, and hosted by Noel King. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

It's Today Explained. I'm Noelle King. You are? I'm Howard Wilkinson, senior political analyst at 91.7 WVXU in Cincinnati. I love it. How long have you been covering politics and analyzing politics in your neck of Ohio? Well, all over Ohio since 1974. Since 1974. So J.D. Vance was negative 10 years old when you started. That would be correct. Most people would be negative, yes. Coming up, James David Vance and the most bananas, that's a quote, Republican primary in America. What it tells us about a party that might be in disarray or might be finding its way.

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please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. J.D. Vance is a figure of national importance these days, but he made his bones with a bestselling memoir about growing up in white working class Ohio. It's one of those books that strives to explain a place and its people, which is why we wanted to talk to Howard Wilkinson, who knows the place and the people. What did you think about the book? I thought it was okay. I mean, to me, that's a subject that I'm very familiar with because I grew up in Dayton, Ohio, which had a very large Appalachian population. People would come up from Kentucky and Tennessee looking for jobs, looking for a better life. So I understood the premise, and I also understood the kind of challenges that those folks face. I thought it was good, but not great. I don't think it's a classic of American literature.

There was a sense that J.D. Vance was a kind of oracle who could explain Donald Trump's win to people who were quite surprised by it. Did you feel that in Ohio, or were you looking around the landscape in Ohio and saying, we don't need anyone to explain why Donald Trump won. Of course Donald Trump won. People in Ohio certainly weren't looking at J.D. Vance as an oracle of anything. They were looking at him as a guy who wrote a book who hadn't lived here in Ohio for most of his adult life. He wrote a long piece in The Atlantic in 2016 on the subject, and it was one of those kind of, I am the oracle, and I can tell you why these people are supporting Donald Trump.

Well, not that many people on the street in Ohio cities or in the farm towns or in the suburbs are reading those articles. And he just wasn't a factor. What was going on in Ohio politics when this book came out? Well, one of the things, I party, the old traditional Republicans who dominated politics in the suburbs of the major cities. And they supported John Kasich, the governor of Ohio. And there was something going on. It was the same kind of thing that was going on in a lot of states where people were frustrated.

They were thinking that they were not paid attention to in Washington. They were not paid attention to in Columbus. And they were looking for someone who would work for them. They saw Trump as that person because he promised, I will make it better, I can make it better. I'm not sure he did in the long run, but people were grasping for, basically grasping for straws and trying to find someone who they could pin their hopes to,

and Donald Trump was available. Right behind me now is the official call inside this room that Donald Trump has taken the 18 electoral votes from Ohio. You can hear the crowd, which is sort of reaching a crescendo here. J.D. Vance, who'd been out in the Bay Area, decides that he's going to move back to his home state and wants to represent Ohio in the Senate. What was the reaction? Nobody really talked about it much at the time.

I mean, they hadn't seen him. And he was kind of this new figure on the scene. They knew, you know, about Hillbilly Elegy and they knew about the movie and they knew a few things about him. I think it was probably a surprise to most people that he really hadn't been an Ohio resident for a long, long time. Once that set in, some people looked at him and said, okay, that's fine. It doesn't bother us. He's an Ohio boy, and he's just coming back home, and he wants to help. Others looked at it and said, no, he's a carpetbagger. If you're running for office, you do need to convince some people, or at least some percentage

of people, that you're not a carpetbagger, that you really are of the region, if you're not recently from the region. How has J.D. Vance gone about doing that? How's he convincing people? I don't know that he is. I mean, what he does is he talks a lot about what he sees as the issues that are important to Ohio Republicans. We're for middle-class people being able to raise a family and do it on a single income. We're for the reindustrialization of this country

so we make more stuff in America. We build our own things. We don't have to rely on the communist Chinese to make our pharmaceutical products. You got to remember, I mean, now he's in a primary contest. You know, his audience is Ohio Republicans who, for the most part, voted for Trump. And so he basically has kind of mimicked the Trump agenda. Do you want to go down the pathway of an America first agenda? Or do you want to go down the pathway of doing the things that we were doing in the Republican Party 20 or so years ago? Because I don't think it was working. Talking a lot about China and talking a lot about the border situation. You know, he very famously said he really didn't care what happened in Ukraine.

At the end of the day, we should not be doing a no-fly zone. We should not be getting involved in Russia at all. It's not our problem. He was more interested in people flooding over the southern border, which didn't go over well with a lot of folks. But, you know, others looked at it and said, yeah, that's right. And that's what Donald Trump says. J.D. Vance was once a critic of Donald Trump's. He went from that position to welcoming Donald Trump's endorsement. How does he justify it? How he justifies it? He said, well, look, he said, yeah, I wasn't very fond of Donald Trump in the beginning. Because I've been very open about the fact that I did say those critical things, and I regret them, and I regret being wrong about the guy.

I think that he was a good president. I think he made a lot of good decisions for people, and I think he took a lot of flack. It convinced me that this man was the person who should be the president of the United States, should have a second term as president of the United States, and I supported him in 2020. That's what he said. Is Donald Trump's endorsement a game changer for J.D. Vance? Does it mean he definitely wins now? No, doesn't mean that at all. It does mean it helps him. There's no question about that. You give him a bump in the polls. But the reaction among Ohio Republicans has been mixed

at best. There are a lot of folks in the Republican Party in Ohio or Republican voters who are kind of shaking their heads and saying, why J.D. Vance? And not everybody's buying this. And it's not going to make or break J.D. Vance. I mean, he still has to work for this thing. Josh Mandel has Ted Cruz doing TV ads for him. End Biden's inflation. Send Josh Mandel to Washington. Mike Gibbons has Rand Paul, who's very popular among the Trump crowd. I'm Rand Paul. I know Mike Gibbons will join me in demanding that Fauci is immediately fired and removed from office. There are many, many Republican leaders, particularly county party chairs, who begged Trump not to do this. And to a certain extent, I think it's the Trump endorsement coming when it did, so late in the game. If this had happened a couple of months ago, it might have sealed the deal for J.D. Vance.

But at this point, Republican voters in Ohio, they know who these people are. Do you think J.D. Vance is kind of a typical politician who tries on identities and uses which identity works in order to win? Like, what do you think is at this gentleman's core? That's what I've been trying to figure out, too, because he has changed, you know, a number of times during his lifetime. And there's, politics does that to people. And being a candidate for public office, and particularly in this atmosphere, makes politicians change. Do you think J.D. Vance could beat the Democrat in the actual Senate race post-primary? You think he could win? I don't know if he's going to win the primary. I think it's entirely possible he could win the primary. I think it's also entirely possible that he could lose and that the Trump voters will be so divided among these candidates that what will happen is

that they are going to possibly make somebody like Matt Dolan, who hasn't been playing this Trump game, come up through the middle and actually win. Anything's possible right now. I've been calling this musical chairs. This is going to be one of those primary elections where whoever is sitting in the last chair in the room, when the music shuts off, that's going to be the winner. And it changes from day to day to day. Thank you. digital photo frame by Wirecutter. Aura frames make it easy to share unlimited photos and videos directly from your phone to the frame. When you give an Aura frame as a gift,

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exclusive to listeners and available just in time for the holidays. Terms and conditions do apply. The president is right. I wasn't always nice, but the simple fact is he's the best president of my lifetime, and he revealed the corruption in this country like nobody else. Start by telling me your name and what you do. I'm Ben Wallace-Wells, and I'm a staff writer at The New Yorker. You are not a native Ohioan, but you spent some time there. Why did you want to watch this primary play out out of all the big primaries this year? From a distance, in the way that it had been described in the national media, it was just the most bananas race in the country. The left is trying to teach our kids there's over 50 genders,

and as young as eight years old old you can just pick your gender. We're being lied to by everybody about Ukraine. Putin's lying to us, Zelensky's lying to us, the UN's lying to us, our government's lying to us, our intelligence community is lying to us. At one candidate forum, two of the candidates almost got in a physical fight. You don't know squat. Two tours in Iraq, don't tell me I haven't worked. You back off. 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 let me say it very clear. I believe this election was stolen. Yes! And let me say it very clear. I believe this election was stolen from Donald Trump.

All these people were competing for Donald Trump's endorsement. And at a deeper level, they were competing for the enthusiasms of his voters. And that seemed to inspire just a very crude approach to politics. When I spoke to campaign operatives, what I heard was that this was a party and a race where people were trying to figure out what it might mean to be a working class party, what it might mean to build the party around an appeal to working class voters, where they had understood the legacy of Trump as a new kind of voter to appeal to. And that part of what was going on in this race

was a sort of working out of different theories, of different possibilities of how that might function. What were you seeing that made you think this is designed to appeal to working class people? I think the sort of easiest, the kind of lowest common denominator reaction from consultants and candidates is that what Trump has given them is just licensed to be cruder. You know, it's licensed to say bad words.

It's licensed to say nasty things about people who are different. Then there is this layer that I think J.D. Vance, though he also has taken part in and sort of represents a second response, which is sort of to take seriously the part of Trumpism that views elites, globalization, the sort of neoliberal world as pretty corrupt and to make his own politics a kind of aggressive stance against that. J.D. Vance went to Yale Law School. How does he explain that one away? If he wants to suggest that he's a guy who is not representative of the elite, does anyone ask him about it? Vance is good at some parts of politics and less good at others. He's pretty cerebral. He's pretty engaged in what ordinary voters are sort of asking and saying.

But, you know, the kind of basic blocking and tackling of campaigning where you explain or deflect obvious criticisms of you. He's not really there yet. I just want to know, how can you claim to represent Appalachia while at the same time being so fundamentally disconnected to it? Not just Appalachia, but also people who attend a college like mine. Sure. Well, I don't think I'm so disconnected. I mean, I don't think Ohio Wesleyan, it's where you go to school, you go to school here. I don't think it's that different from Ohio State, right? That's where I went to college. Look, man, I'm not going to hide from the fact that I've been very successful and I've been very lucky. I've worked hard, but I've also,

you know, everybody I think gets a few lucky breaks. Why did Donald Trump endorse this man? Trump wants to win. He wants to, you know, continue to demonstrate to this party that he is the essential figure because he is the man who can get candidates victories. He is the man who can connect with the new base of the party. Vance, to me, was certainly the most impressive of the figures that I saw in Ohio. He was the smartest. He had a view of what the Republican Party should be doing that went beyond this kind of pattern of crudity that we discussed. If you were going to put your finger on somebody and say, you know, I want to tip the scale for

this guy, Vance seemed a pretty good bet because, you know, he would obviously owe the election to Trump. He also probably would be a favorite to win in November over Tim Ryan, the Democrat who's running. So it seems sort of like a good match for somebody who wanted to win, wanted to be seen as a kingmaker. He fits Trumpism in a way that the others don't. What did J.D. Vance represent before his political bid, do you think? And to whom? I think J.D. Vance succeeded as a public intellectual because he evoked a kind of liberal guilt. I think he represented a vision of small-town America that had been degraded and betrayed by the forces of finance,

industrial and economic change. So my grandparents really were optimistic about the future. They thought that their children would have the American dream, even though my grandparents were born in poverty in eastern Kentucky coal country. But it hasn't really materialized. And you think about these areas that have really suffered economically, that have stagnant upward mobility. It's a certain pessimism about what their own children and grandchildren will expect. And I think that's where the real bitterness comes from. He presented himself as a witness to the ways in which that pressured rural America and the ways in which community and family fabrics might serve as a sort of counterweight or mechanism of repair. During the 2016 election, when we were all talking about deaths of despair and the opioid

epidemic, and trying to understand Trumpism and just the anger of Republican voters in general, I think he offered a pretty compelling thesis, which was there is something sort of fundamental that is behind all this. As he began to spot a political career for himself, he, you know, sort of fell into some of the patterns that have consumed much of the rest of the Republican Party and became a somewhat less distinct figure. You wrote something in your piece. You noticed that J.D. Vance seems to use the word corruption now in a way that, according to you, corruption could be applied to almost any institution at all.

Corruption is just a word he used a ton in following him around on the trail. He spoke about the corruption of the Democratic Party. He spoke about the corruption of elites broadly, of tech companies, the corruption of the FBI. Five, six years ago, if you had told me, and I was naive, but if you had told me that the FBI would have spied on a U.S. presidential candidate, I would have said, no, that's crazy. That wouldn't happen. What eventually persuaded him that he had been wrong about Donald Trump was that the corruption that Trump identified in Washington was more pronounced, more vivid, a bigger deal than he had thought. That corruption and the fact that so many powerful people tried to destroy the president made me realize, you know, there's something about this guy that's very important, that's very meaningful. And there's something interesting in there. There's also something pretty dark in there. Voters, people who would come to the town hall would sort of, you know, sort of speculatively raise different sort of stories from the news. They'd talk about vaccination protocols and ask

if there's something corrupt going on there. They talk about Hunter Biden's laptop and ask if there's something corrupt going on there. And Vance would generally sort of say, yes, yes, I think there might be. I think it's something that should be looked into. I think we ought to investigate. Because Nancy Pelosi, it turns out, is the world's best picker of stocks, right? She's gotten rich of picking stocks. Well, she's a genius, right? And somehow she's the Speaker of the House on one hand, and she's this great stock picker. And you realize it's not because of genius, it's because of corruption. This very general, what we would call populist, sort of message and orientation that had been part of his presentation from the beginning

had sharpened. I think this charge of corruption is a much deeper, a more pervasive, and a sort of darker version. It's not a total transformation of who he is, but I do think that, you know, whether it's sincere, whether it's simply an adaptation to circumstance, he's talking in somewhat darker, somewhat more conspiratorial ways now. There's a different palette. There's a different mood than maybe I had heard from him at least a couple of years earlier. Why do you think it matters to so many people whether J.D. Vance has changed? I think it matters because the Republican Party feels totally up for grabs right now.

It's not clear at all what the party is going to stand for in five years. And you can draw an argument right now that says basically nothing's changed. Still Mitch McConnell's party, still in the pocket, big business, still bristling social conservatism. But you can also draw an argument that says, hey, wait a second, maybe all of this hostility towards Facebook, towards China, towards Amazon, towards illegal immigrants, maybe that's not just a passing thing with Trump. Maybe that's not just specific to this one figure, but maybe that's going what the party stands for of what it stands against is is really important and feels really up for grabs and i think that vance is somebody who was close to a lot of establishment figures in the republican party you know earlier on

who came out of yale law school who has a fancy book agent you know who was sort of part of a very elite world i don't say that pejoratively either, but I do think it suggests that people have thought this is a talent for quite a long time and sort of an interesting figure. And so though he doesn't have the same profile as Trump, though he's a less significant figure in the evolution of the Republican Party, in the same way that what Donald Trump actually cared about didn't care about, in the same way that what Donald Trump actually cared about didn't care about, in the same way that that mattered, who J.D. Vance is, those questions really matter

too. In a party where the lines of right and moderate were more clearly drawn, I think that, you know, these questions of personal orientation, of change, of persona would matter less. That's not the Republican Party that we're living with right now. Right now, in both interesting and complicated ways, things are just up for grabs. Today's show was produced by Victoria Chamberlain, edited by Matthew Collette, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, engineered by Afim Shapiro. I'm Noelle King. It's Today Explained. Thank you.