This is the reaction of JD Vance to Trump’s shooting last week: “The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs,” the junior senator from Ohio tweeted last night following the shooting in Butler, Pennsylvania. “That rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.”
The announcement of JD Vance as the pick for VP was made on Monday during the first day of the Republican national convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Vance first rose to fame in 2016 following the publication of Hillbilly Elegy, which detailed his alleged Appalachian upbringing in Kentucky and his later attendance at Yale law school. The book was adapted into a 2020 film starring Glenn Close and Amy Adams.
For his 2016 memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy,” Vance was venerated by many journalists and book critics as a powerful voice representing long-overlooked Americans. But he’s no working-class hero. He did cement the notion of the Trump Base as a stereotype he reinforced with the book.
Said The Times, Vance portrayed this group — 35% of Americans, by the way — as tragic victims of alcoholism, drug abuse, laziness and their own self-destructive moral failings. Journalists ran with that, bringing their own stereotypes to depict the working class as angry, uneducated white men driven by economic insecurity and racist nostalgia to support Trump’s retrogressive campaign.
According to THe Guardian, Vance himself had been raised in a middle-class household, a fact that the pundits, reviewers and press ignored in favor of the stereotypical picture of the working class he wrote about.
“Media makers cast the white working class as a monolith and imply an old, treacherous story convenient to capitalism: that the poor are dangerous idiots.” (LA Times)
The Independent. And LA Times