Chapter 3
MAKING OF A PRESIDENT
Chapter Three — The Book That Was a Resume
Draft 1. Approximate length: 3,800 words. Voice: continuous. The chapter does one thing: explain how a memoir written by a Yale Law student in his late twenties became a piece of political infrastructure. By the end of the chapter the reader understands that Hillbilly Elegy was not a book that happened to lead to a political career. It was a piece of political career-building disguised as a memoir, and the disguise was the point.
I want to tell you a few things about the book, because if you are like most readers of the book you have a particular memory of reading it, and I want to put that memory next to a different one.
Hillbilly Elegy was published in June of 2016 by HarperCollins. It is approximately two hundred and fifty pages long. It is written in the first person. It tells the story of a young man named James David Vance who grew up in Middletown, Ohio, and Jackson, Kentucky, in a working-class extended family marked by addiction, instability, divorce, occasional violence, and a great deal of love. The young man enlists in the Marines after high school, serves a tour as a public affairs officer in Iraq, returns home, attends Ohio State on the GI Bill, completes his bachelor’s degree, and then, against the odds of the world he came from, is admitted to Yale Law School, where the book ends with him meeting his future wife and launching his career.
The book sold seven million copies. It was a bestseller for sixty-four weeks. It was made into a movie by Ron Howard, with Glenn Close and Amy Adams in the central roles, in 2020. By the time the movie came out, Hillbilly Elegy was no longer a book. It was a property — a brand around which a man could build a public career.
The book, as a piece of writing, has merits. The voice is conversational and clear. The pacing is good. The author has a real eye for the specific details of working-class life in southwestern Ohio and the Appalachian foothills of eastern Kentucky. The depictions of his grandmother, who he calls Mamaw, and his grandfather, who he calls Papaw, are vivid and affectionate. The depictions of his mother, who struggled with addiction, are sad and honest. The book has the basic virtues of a competent first memoir by an intelligent person.
The book also has a thesis. The thesis is the part of the book that I want to talk about, because the thesis is the audition tape. The thesis is what made the book politically useful. The thesis is what allowed a memoir by an unknown twenty-eight-year-old law student to become, almost instantly, a piece of conventional wisdom in the rooms where conventional wisdom is made.
The thesis of Hillbilly Elegy is that the working class of the American interior — the white, predominantly Scots-Irish, Appalachian-rooted working class that Vance grew up in — is in decline because of cultural failings within itself. The book acknowledges, in passing, that economic forces have been bad to the region. It mentions the closing of the steel mills. It mentions the loss of manufacturing jobs. It mentions the opioid epidemic. But the book’s argument, expressed across hundreds of pages of personal anecdote and occasional sociological reflection, is that the deepest cause of the decline is behavioral. The people of the working-class interior, the book argues, have lost the work ethic and the family stability and the religious cohesion that made their parents and grandparents successful. They drink too much. They divorce too easily. They take government benefits when they should be working. They blame outside forces for problems they have created themselves.
The argument is not stated in those words. The argument is stated in the gentle, anecdotal, almost sorrowful voice of a man writing about his own family. But the argument is unmistakable. Vance writes, in one of the book’s most quoted passages: “There is a lack of agency here — a feeling that you have little control over your life, and a willingness to blame everyone but yourself.”
This is the thesis. This is what made the book sellable. This is what made the book politically useful in 2016, the year Donald Trump won the presidency by carrying the very communities Vance was describing.
To understand why the thesis was politically useful, I have to tell you who needed it.
In November of 2016, Donald Trump won the presidential election. He won, in significant part, by carrying counties in the Midwest and Appalachia that had voted Democratic in 2008 and 2012 but that swung to him in 2016. The political class — by which I mean the columnists, the political consultants, the donors, the academics, the editors, and the cable news bookers — was startled. The political class had not expected Trump to win. The political class had not expected those counties to flip. The political class went looking for an explanation.
The explanation that the political class wanted, but did not yet have, was an explanation that allowed the political class to understand what had happened without requiring it to change anything about its own assumptions, policies, or priorities. The political class wanted an explanation that said: those counties flipped because the people in them have particular cultural pathologies that they are now expressing through their voting behavior. The political class did not want an explanation that said: those counties flipped because the trade policies, regulatory choices, and economic priorities of the political class itself have been ruinous to the people who live there for forty years, and the people who live there have finally rebelled.
Hillbilly Elegy offered the explanation the political class wanted. The book was, as it happened, already on the bestseller list when the election results came in. Within days of the election, every major newspaper, every major magazine, and every major cable news network booked Vance to come on and explain what had happened. He did. He explained it the way the book explained it. He explained that the people of the working-class interior had cultural failings that the election had revealed. He explained that the political class needed to understand these failings in order to respond.
He was, at the time, twenty-eight months out of Yale Law School. He had no relevant political experience. He had not, until that moment, been a public figure. He was a venture capitalist working at a small firm in San Francisco that almost no one outside Silicon Valley had ever heard of. The firm was Mithril Capital. The firm’s principal funder was Peter Thiel.
Within eighteen months, Vance was a household name. He was on every cable network. He was speaking at think tanks. He was profiled in the New Yorker and the Atlantic. He was the working class’s translator to the political class, despite the fact that he had not, by 2017, lived as a member of the working class for nearly a decade and despite the fact that the framework he was offering the political class was a framework that absolved the political class of responsibility for what had happened.
This is the audition. This is what the book was. The book was an application for a position, and the position was the working class’s chosen interpreter to the political class. The position pays well. It comes with speaking fees, magazine bylines, television appearances, foundation grants, and, eventually, the option to run for office.
JD Vance got the position. He got it because his book offered the political class the framework the political class needed in the precise moment the political class was looking for it. He got it because the framework absolved the political class while appearing to be sympathetic to the working class. He got it because the framework was endorsable, by both the right-wing publications that wanted to scold the working class for cultural decline and the center-left publications that wanted an explanation for Trump that did not implicate the center-left’s own policy record.
He got it, also, because the network that I described in the previous chapter recognized, very early, that the man who had won this position would be the man who, if cultivated correctly, could be moved into electoral politics with an extraordinary head start.
I want to give you a passage from the book, because I want to show you what it sounds like when you read it through this frame.
In the second chapter of Hillbilly Elegy, Vance describes his return from a deployment in Iraq. He has been working with the Marines as a public affairs officer. He comes home and starts shopping at a discount supermarket. He notices that the people in line ahead of him are using food stamps and buying things he considers indulgences — steaks, cell phones, energy drinks. He writes, with a tone of mild but deliberate disappointment, about his discomfort. He uses the moment to introduce one of the book’s recurring themes: that government assistance to the working-class interior has, in his view, contributed to the cultural decline of the region by removing the necessity of work and the dignity that work provides.
The passage is well written. It is concrete. It uses small details — the cell phone, the steak, the energy drink — to make a point that, on first reading, sounds compassionate and observant.
Read it again. Look at what the passage is actually doing.
The passage is taking a snapshot of a person at a checkout counter and using the snapshot to make a generalization about an entire region. The passage does not tell you whether the person with the cell phone is between jobs because the local mill closed. The passage does not tell you whether the steak is the only meat the family has had that week. The passage does not tell you whether the energy drink is what the person is drinking to stay awake on the night shift at a job that pays nine dollars an hour. The passage does not tell you any of this because the passage is not interested in any of this. The passage is interested in producing an emotional response in the reader — a quiet sense that the working-class interior has lost something essential — and it is using a snapshot at a checkout counter to produce that response.
This is the technique of the book. The book is built out of these snapshots. The snapshots are real, in the sense that they happened. The snapshots are also selected. The book chooses the snapshots that support the thesis. It does not choose the snapshots that complicate it.
A different memoir, written by a different young man with the same childhood, could have selected different snapshots. A snapshot of the recruiter who pushed him into the Marines in part because the local economy offered him no other path. A snapshot of the doctor who first prescribed his mother the opioids that began her addiction. A snapshot of the trade agreement that closed the mill where his stepfather had worked. The snapshots would have produced a different emotional response. The emotional response would have placed responsibility outside the working-class interior, in the rooms where economic policy and corporate strategy and pharmaceutical marketing are made.
That memoir was not written. Hillbilly Elegy was written. The memoir that was written was the one that the political class needed. The one that the political class did not need was not commissioned, was not promoted, was not made into a movie, and was not turned into the foundation of a Senate campaign.
I am not saying JD Vance was insincere when he wrote Hillbilly Elegy. I have no way of knowing that. I am saying that the book that he wrote was a book whose political utility, to the people who funded his subsequent career, was visible from the moment of its publication, and that the people who funded his subsequent career began funding it with that utility in mind.
Let me give you the chronology one more time, with the publication of the book in its proper place.
In 2010, Vance is a third-year student at Yale Law School. He attends a talk by Peter Thiel and describes the experience, in interviews he gives a decade later, as the most significant moment of his time at Yale.
In 2013, Vance graduates from Yale Law and takes a job at a corporate firm in Washington, D.C. He stays for less than a year.
In 2014, Vance moves to San Francisco and begins working at Mithril Capital, the venture capital firm co-founded by Peter Thiel.
In 2015, Vance signs a book deal with HarperCollins for what will become Hillbilly Elegy. He writes the book on weekends and evenings while working at Mithril.
In June of 2016, the book is published. It enters the New York Times bestseller list within weeks.
In November of 2016, Donald Trump wins the presidency. Vance, who has during the campaign described Trump as “America’s Hitler” in private text messages that will later become public, becomes one of the most quoted public commentators on the working-class voters who delivered Trump the election.
In 2017, Vance moves back to Ohio and founds Narya Capital, his own venture capital firm, with funding from Thiel, Marc Andreessen, and Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google. Narya Capital invests in companies aligned with the network’s political and ideological priorities.
In 2018 and 2019, Vance gives speeches, writes essays, and appears on podcasts, gradually shifting his public position on Trump from critical to neutral to supportive. His political philosophy moves from a soft Reformicon conservatism to a hard post-liberal stance aligned with the men he is now in business with.
In 2021, Vance announces his Senate candidacy. Thiel commits fifteen million dollars to a super PAC supporting his primary campaign, the largest single contribution to a Senate primary in the history of the FEC.
In 2022, Vance wins the Senate seat.
In 2024, Trump names him as his running mate.
The book was the first event in the chronology. The Senate seat was nine years later. The vice presidency was eleven years later. Every event in between was funded, supported, or facilitated by men who had been in the room with Vance from the moment the book was written.
The book was not a memoir that became a political career. The book was the opening act of the political career, written in the form of a memoir.
I want to close this chapter with a thought about the working-class reader.
If you are a reader of Hillbilly Elegy who is yourself from a place like the one the book describes, you may have, when you read the book, recognized things in it. The grandmother who calls everyone honey and threatens to shoot them with the same casualness. The uncle who has been in three fights this year, two of them with relatives. The mother who comes back from rehab the third time, the fifth time, the seventh time. The boy who has to choose between the Marines and a job at the Pizza Hut.
These things are real. The book describes real things, and the description, on the page, is often good.
What I want you to consider is this. The book describes those real things in a particular way. The way is the way that allows the political class to feel that it understands the working-class interior without having to do anything about the conditions that produced the things the book describes. The way absolves the political class of having created or maintained those conditions. The way frames the conditions as the working-class interior’s own doing.
If you are a reader of Hillbilly Elegy who recognized things in it, the book invited you to recognize those things and then to accept a frame about them that lets the people who could change the conditions continue not changing them. The frame is not your fault for accepting. The frame is hard to see when you are inside it. The frame is the work of the book.
The book that became JD Vance’s resume was, for the working-class reader, an invitation to accept a story about themselves that served the people who funded the book’s promotion. The story is not the only possible story. The story is the story the donor class needed told.
A different story is possible. A different story is what the rest of this book is going to tell.
In the next chapter, I am going to walk you through the Senate campaign. I am going to show you what fifteen million dollars buys when it is spent on a single primary candidate in a single Midwestern state. I am going to show you the conversion narrative — the public arc by which a man who privately called Donald Trump America’s Hitler in 2016 became, by 2022, Trump’s chosen successor.
The story of how that conversion happened is the story of how the network operates when it is operating at full capacity. The story is on the record. I am going to walk you through it next.
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