FROM HOLLER TO HYPOCRISY -- THE MAGA-FICATION OF JD VANCE

In 2016, Donald Trump needed to convince church-going Evangelists that a twice-divorced adulterer and erstwhile pro-choicer could still be their President.  

So he picked Mike Pence to be his Vice President.

Today, Trump needs to convince some supposedly undecided voters residing in Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Arizona and Nevada that an election-denying, J6 coup plotting authoritarian with a preternatural allergy to facts and truth is not a wanna-be fascist ready to turn America into a 21st century version of the 20th century's Axis powers.

This is a tall order.

In a sane world, a normal political party would search for someone who was not an election denying, J6 coup plotting authoritarian.

Someone, for example, like Nikki Haley.

In an even saner world, the election denying, J6 coup-plotting nominee would concede the past so as to jettison the denial and distance himself from the coup.

Donald Trump, however, is not a normal nominee and the Republicans are not a sane political party.

They are both in love with lies.

The lies . . .

That Trump won the presidential election in 2020; 

That his then-Vice President could have legally refused to count legitimate electoral votes because he (or his agents) had created  fraudulent slates of so-called alternative electors; 

That he bore no responsibility for the mob he told to "fight like hell" on January 6; the one that ransacked the Capitol and terrorized elected Representatives, Senators, staff and police to stop the vote count; the one he could have but did not control and never ordered the National Guard to disperse.

So this time he picked JD Vance to be his Vice President.

Who, unlike Pence, is a Trump mini-me.

And is . . .

Also unlike Pence . . .

In love with the same lies.

JD Vance is the 39-year-old junior Senator from Ohio.  His political resume consists of two years in the Senate.  He is an ex-Marine and though he rails against elitists, he willingly attended and then subsequently exploited a degree from Yale Law School to obtain more wealth than he ever imagined possible in the neighborhoods that raised him.  

Those neighborhoods, of course, also put him on the map.

Or, put more accurately, he put them on the map in a best-selling memoir. 

The memoir, entitled Hillbilly Elegy, was published in 2016.

It was a great book.

And its author could have become a great man.

Had he remained true to its core insight.

But he hasn't.

The core insight of Hillbilly Elegy is that individual honesty and responsibility matter.  

Vance is a Scots-Irish  product of a "holler" in Kentucky's Appalachian hill country. Though he was not born there, his parents, grand-parents and extended family of uncles, aunts and cousins were.  He regularly returned there from Middletown, Ohio, and was basically raised by his grandparents, who also left but also regularly returned and who are (as he expects to be) buried there.

The nuclear and extended Vance family was, to be kind and in JD's transparently honest telling, dysfunctional. Though independent, self-reliant and manically loyal to their own, they were -- as often as not -- unhinged, violent and utterly irresponsible.  

Thanks to his mother's addictions and serial love life, he has had to try on three last names. Picked up from "a September day in kindergarten," he was told he'd "never see [his] dad again.", who gave him up for adoption. And at home, he was "introduc[ed] to "marital conflict resolution." 

"Here were the takeaways," he says: "Never speak at a reasonable volume when screaming will do; if the fight gets a little too intense, it's ok to slap and punch, so long as the man doesn't hit first; always express your feelings in a way that's insulting and hurtful to your partner". 

Child rearing was not much better. 

As his mother "cycled through boyfriends," JD grew "accustomed to a certain amount of instability . . . There would be fighting or running away from fights; when things got rocky, Mom would explode on us or even slap or punch us . . . With partying came alcohol and with alcohol came alcohol abuse".

Things got so bad that Vance, more than once, had to lie to keep his mother out of jail.

The upside was his grandparents eventually took over. 

By then, they had overcome alcoholism and skirt-chasing (grandpa) and "covert war" (grandma) -- and, apparently, a "Hillbilly culture" that then "blended a robust sense of honor, devotion to family, and bizarre sexism into a sometimes explosive mix" -- to be the parents to Vance they had not been to Vance's mother. Though they lived apart, grandfather Papaw was an FDR devotee who had a steady job at (and unvarnished pride in) Armco, the steel production company, and grandmother Mamaw (with whom Vance lived) had three rules: "Get good grades, get a job and 'get off your ass and help me'."

JD needed them.

By high school, his musical chairs life of changing homes, an addicted mom and "the express train to crazy" had turned him into a likely drop-out and potential druggie. 

His grandmother saved him from that. 

The Marines then turned him into a disciplined, capable and independent man.

And Ohio State and Yale Law were his path out of the rust belt and the holler.

On Wednesday night, he became Donald Trump's (second) running mate and the Republican Party's 2024 candidate for Vice-President. 

His acceptance speech was an odd amalgam of family pride, devotion to the class and culture of his birth, and creation of political history that doesn't exist to save the neighbors he claims Joe Biden (but not Donald Trump) forgot.

To get there, and let's be unapologetically Mamaw-ish on this point, he had to kiss Donald Trump's ass.  

Though careful to avoid the subject last night, JD thinks the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump and the J6 Capitol seizure not all that important and certainly not something for which Trump bears any responsibility. 

In advancing these claims over time, Vance had been cagey.  Trump's claims of outright fraud become, on Vance's telling, legitimate disputes over rules changes that worked (in some  but not all places) to Trump's disadvantage. He ignores the fact that courts said the rules changes -- which merely increased the ability to mail in ballots or vote before election day in light of Covid -- were valid both before they were used and after the election had occurred.

He also ignores Trump's conduct on January 6.

This is right out of Hillbilly Elegy . . .

But without any of the honesty.

In the holler, as in the case of Trump, violence to different degrees is an accepted way of life for which no apology is sought or given.  Vance was honest enough in his book to call this out but has resurrected the denial of his youth when confronted with the same behavior by Trump.  Put more starkly, the JD who peed in a cup to save his Mom on a urine test is now whitewashing Trump's lies to, so he says, save America.

He should know better.

Enabling never works.

His "save America" lies now  will fare no better than his save Mom lies did way back then.  

Beverly Vance was addicted to alcohol and drugs.

Donald Trump is addicted to power and himself.

As Vance told us last night, Beverly is in recovery, now for almost ten years.

Donald Trump, however, is not.

The other exercise in enabling on stage last night in Milwaukee was Vance's denial of history.  

In Hillbilly, Vance got a lot of his history right.  Grandma and grandpa were both Democrats, the latter a lover of FDR's New Deal and the pro-labor world it established that put Armco in Middletown, Ohio and gave him his life's work, the former a lover of Bill Clinton, a product of the rural south who could feel her pain. 

He also called out the holler's instinctual aversion to "the other", one that worked (unfairly) against Barack Obama, and noted that, in his experience at home, the lazy "welfare queens" were white.  Finally, Hillbilly was honest in describing the hollowing out of the mid-western manufacturing economy and the unfair burden that has imposed on the poor.

Last night, however, Vance told us he was against the passage of NAFTA in the 1990s, against the globalization that has allowed Wall Street to arbitrage American labor with cheaper foreign substitutes for the last thirty years, and against the war in Iraq in 2003. Ted Kennedy, Bernie Sanders and a host of other Democrats were against all of that as well, and  Ronald Reagan, the two George Bushes and the entire Republican Party were for it all.  For his part, Barack Obama opposed the war in Iraq,

But in Vance's world, all these policies are the fault of Joe Biden.

This is denial on steroids.

Nor did Vance's effort improve when he talked about Trump.

His claim that Trump opposed the war in Iraq was false.  Trump did not.  His claim that inflation adjusted earnings and workers' wages rose at unprecedented levels under Trump was also false.  Inflation adjusted wages stagnated until around 2014 and began to grow in Obama's second term at levels that were matched (because of Obama's policies which Trump inherited) but not exceeded in Trump's term.

There is a lot that needs to be done to bring back the holler.  

But . . .

On infrastructure, manufacturing and jobs, especially in the rural areas that Vance claims as his own, Biden is doing what Trump never did.

In truth, Vance's speech last night was designed to convince voters that he and Trump were somehow left-wingers on the economy and war in the 1980s, '90s and 2003 so that voters will allow them to be right-wingers in 2025 and thereafter.

The transformation, however, is impossible.

Trump has a record he cannot escape.  He supported Bush's Iraqi war. His mismanagement of the Covid pandemic was monumental; the advice to ingest bleach was his low point but of late he has even undermined his high point -- creating the vaccine -- by siding with deniers. The economy he brags about was Obama's, not his. For four years, he promised but never passed an infrastructure bill. And his tax cuts were just another GOP version of relief for the wealthy.

Vance, however, is also without escape.  

Though he was kid (or a soldier and student) until 2013, he made choices thereafter. 

If he really thought America's pols had ignored his neighbors for thirty years, he would have found many more allies in the Democratic Party than he could ever find in the Republican one. 

Ted Kennedy, Bernie Sanders, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, Ohio's own Sherrod Brown and even Joe Biden are light-years closer to what Vance claims to be for now than anything on offer from Trump or the GOP.  With the latter, it's tariffs and tax cuts and the false claim that illegals are stealing jobs in the holler.  With the former, it's labor law reform, unionism, an increased minimum wage, the Affordable Care Act, infrastructure spending, a reemerging auto industry, the return of manufacturing and the green jobs of the future. The GOP supports none of this. In fact, they have spent much of the last week  maligning it in Milwaukee.

And then, of course, there's the right wing JD Vance. The one he hid last night. The one who . . . 

Thinks abused women should stay in abusive marriages . . .

Opposes abortion even in the case of rape or incest . . .

Doesn't care "what happens in Ukraine one way or the other" . . .

And, worst of all . . .

Would not have certified the 2020 election had he been Vice President.

In Hillbilly, Vance had some painful advice for "his neighbors, friends and family."

"The truth is hard," he said, "and the hardest truths for hill people are the ones they must tell about themselves."

Maybe he should re-read his book.