Chapter One
MAKING OF A PRESIDENT
Chapter One — The Made Man
Draft 1. Approximate length: 3,400 words. Voice: Hynes from UNINCORPORĀTUS — concrete, worker-centered, unflinching, not partisan, not abstract. The chapter is reported. Every fact is a fact the reader can check. The chapter does one thing: build trust with the reader so that when the book begins to walk, the reader follows.
There is footage of the moment, and you have probably seen it. July of 2024, Milwaukee, the Republican National Convention, a hot night under the lights. James David Vance walks onto the stage in a navy suit and a red tie that the staff has straightened twice. He is thirty-nine years old. He is one of the youngest men ever nominated for vice president of the United States. He is, by his own telling and by the telling of the book that made him famous, the son of a hollowed-out Ohio town and a mother who fought addiction and a grandmother who taught him to read. He raises a hand to the crowd. The crowd raises a roar back. The cameras find his wife in the front row.
If you watched this on the television in your living room, with a beer or a coffee or a child on your knee, you were watching what looked like a victory for someone like you. A working-class kid had gone to Yale, written a book about the place he came from, and walked himself onto the second-highest stage in American politics. The country, for a moment, looked like it was working the way the country was supposed to work.
It was not.
I want to be careful here, because the man who walked on that stage did walk himself, in the limited sense that any human being walks himself anywhere. He earned grades. He served in the Marines. He wrote a book that sold. He did the things a man does when a man is trying to climb. None of that is in dispute, and none of it is the subject of this book.
The subject of this book is the difference between climbing and being lifted. The difference between a ladder and an elevator. The difference between a man who walks onto a stage because he made it there and a man who walks onto a stage because the people who own the stage decided he should.
JD Vance did not make it onto that stage. He was placed there. The placement was deliberate, the placement was funded, the placement was the work of a small number of very wealthy men who had identified, several years earlier, that a man who looked like Vance and spoke like Vance and had the biography of Vance was the kind of man who could carry an agenda the very wealthy men needed carried.
This is not a conspiracy theory. There is nothing hidden about it. The men involved have given interviews. The money is on the record with the Federal Election Commission. The networks are documented in The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, and the donor’s own written essays. The story of how JD Vance became the Republican nominee for vice president of the United States is a story that has been told in pieces in mainstream publications by reporters whose names I will cite, and the only thing I am going to do in the chapters that follow is put the pieces in one place so that you can see what the pieces look like when they are next to each other.
What the pieces look like, when they are next to each other, is the making of a president.
Let me give you the shape of it before I give you the detail.
In 2011, a man named Peter Thiel — a billionaire venture capitalist, co-founder of PayPal, early investor in Facebook, citizen of three countries — gave a lecture at Stanford Law School on the future of the American republic. The lecture has been published. In it, he argued that democracy and freedom were no longer compatible, and that he had given up on the idea of political democracy as a vehicle for the things he believed in.
In that same year, a Yale Law student named JD Vance attended a talk Thiel gave on a separate visit and described the experience, in interviews he would give a decade later, as the most important intellectual event of his life. He sought Thiel out. He kept in touch. After law school he went to work, briefly, at a firm in Washington, then took a job at a Thiel-affiliated investment fund in San Francisco. He wrote a book on the side about the place he came from. The book sold seven million copies. It was called Hillbilly Elegy.
In 2021, Thiel gave fifteen million dollars — at the time the largest contribution any single individual had ever given to a single Senate primary candidate — to a super PAC supporting Vance’s run for the Republican nomination for the Senate seat from Ohio. Vance won the primary. He won the general. He went to Washington as a freshman senator.
He was not the only one writing checks. David Sacks, another PayPal alumnus, held a twelve-million-dollar fundraiser for Trump at his home in San Francisco and spoke at the Republican National Convention. Palmer Luckey, the founder of Oculus, gave to Vance in 2022 and praised his conversion from Trump critic to Trump heir on social media. Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, who run the most prominent venture capital firm in Silicon Valley, released a podcast explaining their support for the ticket on the grounds that the alternative would regulate their investments in artificial intelligence and cryptocurrency. Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, committed his America PAC to the Trump-Vance ticket and used the social media platform he owns to amplify the campaign daily. The Winklevoss twins, the crypto billionaires, the Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, the Sequoia Capital partner Doug Leone — the names pile up. The money piles up faster.
This was not one man placing a candidate. This was an industry. A network of technology billionaires who shared three goals — minimal regulation of artificial intelligence, minimal regulation of cryptocurrency, and minimal taxation of their own wealth — and who had identified in JD Vance a vessel who could carry those goals into the second-highest office in the country while appearing to carry the interests of the working class instead.
In 2024, Donald Trump named him as his running mate. The men who had identified Vance, cultivated Vance, funded Vance, and placed Vance in the Senate had now placed him a single sudden cardiac event away from the presidency of the United States.
I am going to spend the next five chapters walking through that sentence one phrase at a time, because the sentence is the truth and the truth is what the rest of this book stands on. If you do not believe me about the sentence, you will not believe me about anything that follows. So I will earn it. I will walk slow. I will name the names and quote the documents and let you check my work. The footnotes are at the back of the book. The references are real. The events happened. You can pull up the New York Times archive on your phone right now while you read this and you will find every fact I am about to lay out for you.
What I am asking you to take from this chapter is not a fact. It is a frame.
The frame is this. There is a way that presidents and vice presidents are made in the United States that is not the way you were taught in school. In the way you were taught in school, the people of a state choose someone to be their senator, and the people of the country choose someone to be their president, and the people who are chosen are the people who deserved it because the people decided they deserved it. The model assumes the people are the ones doing the deciding.
The frame I am offering you is that the people are not, in any of the cases this book is going to walk through, the ones doing the deciding. The deciding is being done at a level above the people, by a number of people small enough that you could fit them in the back room of a steakhouse, and the deciding is then being marketed back to the people as a choice the people made.
This is not a partisan frame. The same thing happens, in slightly different ways with slightly different donors and slightly different cultivated candidates, in the Democratic Party. It will happen, in slightly different ways, in whatever party emerges next, because the structure that produces it is older than the parties and stronger than the parties. The frame is not about Republicans or Democrats. The frame is about a class of people — call them the donor class, call them the 1%, call them what you will — that has acquired, over the last forty years, the practical ability to determine who gets onto the stage in Milwaukee and who does not.
Within that frame, JD Vance is one specimen. He is the specimen this book opens with because his case is unusually well documented and unusually recent and unusually clean. The donors are named. The money is traced. The cultivation is on the record. The biography that was used to sell him to the working class was written before the cultivation began and was, in retrospect, the audition tape that got him hired.
In the chapters that follow I am going to walk through the cultivation. The Yale Law network. The intellectual venues. The American Conservative and the post-liberal right and the Catholic integralist circles that gave Vance his vocabulary. The conversion narrative — from never-Trump to Trump’s heir — that was necessary for the placement to land in the modern Republican Party. The Senate seat. The selection. The signaling.
You will see, by the time we get to the end of Chapter Six, that the man who walked onto the stage in Milwaukee in July of 2024 had been walked onto that stage by people who began the walk a decade earlier with a clear sense of where the stage would be.
You will then, I hope, take the frame I have just given you and hold it in your mind for the rest of the book. Because the rest of the book is about other ways presidents are made. Some of those ways are stranger than billionaires. Some of those ways are stranger than anything you have read in the news. By the time we are done, I am going to ask you to consider three different makings of three different presidents, and I am going to ask you to decide which one of them is the real one.
For now, all I am asking is that you consider the first one. The one that is in the public record. The one that is sitting in The New York Times archive on your phone right now.
Let me close this chapter with something concrete, because abstractions are the language captured government uses to put you to sleep, and concrete is the language that wakes you up.
In Middletown, Ohio, where JD Vance grew up, the population in 2024 was approximately fifty thousand. The median household income was approximately fifty-four thousand dollars a year. The largest employer in town for most of the twentieth century was Armco Steel, later AK Steel, later Cleveland-Cliffs. The mill is still there. The town is not what it was.
The men and women who work in that mill, and the men and women who used to work in that mill before the layoffs of the 1980s and the 1990s and the 2010s, are the people JD Vance was sold to the country as having come from and represented. He did come from there. The first part of the sentence is true. The second part is the part this book is about.
The mill workers in Middletown did not decide that JD Vance was going to be the Republican nominee for vice president of the United States. They were not consulted. Their opinion of him was constructed for them by a media apparatus funded in significant part by the same men who funded his Senate campaign. By the time the mill workers in Middletown were asked, in a primary ballot in Ohio in May of 2022, whether they wanted JD Vance to be their senator, they had been told for a year and a half that he was their man. They voted accordingly.
This is not a critique of the mill workers in Middletown. It is a description of the conditions under which the mill workers in Middletown made a decision the donor class had spent fifteen million dollars to make for them.
If you are reading this book in Middletown, or in a town like Middletown, and you voted for JD Vance in the 2022 primary or the 2022 general or the 2024 presidential, I am not telling you that you were wrong. I am telling you that the choice you were given was not a choice between a hundred possible representatives of the working class. The choice you were given was between one cultivated candidate and another cultivated candidate, and the cultivation in both cases happened in rooms you have never been in, with money you have never had, by people who have never set foot in your town.
This is the condition under which presidents are made in the United States in our time. It is the condition the rest of this book is going to ask you to look at directly. It is also the condition that, by the end of this book, two other forces in this country will try to break.
Something is going to happen between this chapter and the last one that I cannot tell you about yet. You would not believe me. By the time we get there, you will. You will have walked there with me, page by page, and the only way you will know we have crossed a line is by looking back from the other side.
The first making is the one that is on the record. The first making is JD Vance.
His story is in the next five chapters. Then, when you trust me, we will walk.
