MAKING OF A PRESIDENT

Chapter Six — The Reader Trusts Me Now

Draft 1. Approximate length: 2,500 words. Voice: continuous. The chapter does one thing: consolidate Part One and prepare the seam to Chapter Seven. The chapter is short on purpose — the reader has been reading reportage for five chapters and needs a beat. The chapter ends with the seam I have already drafted in 05-THE-SEAM.md, which carries the reader directly into Chapter Seven without a perceptible break.

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I owe you a few things before we go any further.

I owe you an account of what we have done in the last five chapters, what I have asked you to believe, and what evidence you have for believing it.

I owe you an account of what the next chapters are going to ask of you that the last five did not, and what kind of trust I am going to need from you to ask it.

I owe you, lastly, the honest disclosure that the last five chapters are not the only book I could have written about JD Vance. They are the book I needed to write before I could write the rest of what I have to say. They are the part I could prove. They are the part where the receipts are on file. They are the part you can verify with a phone in your hand.

What is coming is different. I will tell you exactly how different in a moment. But first, let me give you what we have.

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We have a man.

The man is named James David Vance. He was born on August 2, 1984, in Middletown, Ohio. He grew up in conditions of working-class instability that he later wrote a book about. He served in the Marines as a public affairs officer in Iraq. He attended Ohio State on the GI Bill. He was admitted to Yale Law School in 2010. While at Yale Law, he attended a talk by a man named Peter Thiel and described it, later, as the most significant moment of his time there. He graduated in 2013, worked briefly at a corporate law firm, and then took a job at Mithril Capital, a venture capital firm co-founded by Peter Thiel.

We have a book.

The book is Hillbilly Elegy, published in June of 2016 by HarperCollins. The book is a memoir framed by an argument. The argument is that the cultural decline of the working-class American interior is principally caused by the failings of the working-class American interior itself. The book sold seven million copies. It made its author a national figure overnight. It served, in the political environment of late 2016 and 2017, as the dominant conventional explanation for the election of Donald Trump.

We have a network.

The network includes Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, David Sacks, Marc Andreessen, Ben Horowitz, Reid Hoffman (who is on the other side of the political ledger but is part of the same business cohort), Joe Lonsdale, Doug Leone, Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, Palmer Luckey, and a wider class of technology billionaires whose names I have given you in detail in the previous chapters. The network shares a coherent political program — minimal regulation of artificial intelligence and cryptocurrency, dismantling of the federal civil service, restructuring of the universities, transactional foreign policy, and reduction of taxation on the wealthy. The network has been openly stating this program for at least fifteen years.

We have a sequence of investments.

In 2017, Vance founded Narya Capital with funding from Thiel, Andreessen, and Eric Schmidt. In 2021, Thiel committed fifteen million dollars to a super PAC supporting Vance’s Senate campaign — at the time the largest single contribution to a Senate primary in the history of the FEC. In 2022, after a Trump endorsement that Thiel arranged, Vance won the Republican primary in Ohio and the general election that followed. In 2024, Trump named Vance as his running mate. In the campaign that followed, the network spent between three hundred million and seven hundred million dollars in support of the ticket, in coordinated public activities that included Musk’s hundred-million-dollar America PAC, Sacks’s twelve-million-dollar fundraiser, Andreessen and Horowitz’s podcast endorsement, and Luckey’s distribution of the campaign’s iconic image in the hours after the assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania.

We have a return on investment.

In the first year of the second Trump administration, the network received, through federal contracts, regulatory rollbacks, tax preferences, and direct policy decisions favorable to its business interests, value estimated at between fifty and one hundred billion dollars. Musk was given an office in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building. Sacks was named crypto and AI czar. Andreessen reportedly staffed multiple administration positions. Lonsdale’s Palantir received an order-of-magnitude expansion of its federal contracts. Vance himself became the public face of the administration’s program of dismantlement.

We have a stated intention.

In December of 2025, Elon Musk publicly predicted twelve years of Trump-Vance-Vance — Trump completing his second term, Vance succeeding him in 2028, and Vance serving two terms of his own. The prediction was, given the speaker’s position, an announcement of intent.

This is what we have. This is what I have laid out for you across the first five chapters. Every piece of it is on the public record. Every claim I have made can be verified in published reporting from Forbes, NPR, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, Politico, Bloomberg, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Atlantic, and the FEC’s own database.

If a single fact in the first five chapters of this book is wrong, write to me. I will correct it. I will credit you. I will, if you tell me to, post a public correction on the website I maintain. The receipts are real. The receipts are checkable. I have shown you my work.

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By now you have what you need.

You know who Peter Thiel is, what he believes, what he has written, and what he has spent. You know who JD Vance was before he was JD Vance — a Marine, a Yale Law student, a young man with a paperback book and a chip on his shoulder. You know who he became after Thiel found him — an essayist in The American Conservative, a venture capitalist at Mithril, a senatorial candidate funded by a single check larger than any single check that had ever been written for any single Senate primary in the history of the Federal Election Commission. You know how the conversion happened. You know who endorsed him and when. You know who got him onto the ticket. You know the names. You know the dollars. You know the dates.

If something happens to JD Vance between the day this book goes to print and the day you read it, you will know what to look at. You will know whose phones to want subpoenaed and whose financial records to want pulled. You will know which men in which rooms have to answer for which decisions. You will not be one of the people who watches the news that night and says I do not understand how this could have happened. You will understand. You will have been told.

This is what I owed you. The first six chapters of this book are the part I owed you because the part that comes next is the part I have to ask you to walk into with me, and I am not going to ask that of you on credit. I have shown you my work. I have given you the receipts. The parts of the story I just told you are parts you can verify in any of forty different newspapers and on any of a dozen government websites. If a single fact in the first six chapters of this book is wrong, write to me and I will correct it in the next printing and credit you in the front matter.

What comes next is not on the record. What comes next is what I have come to believe, after a year of paying attention to the kind of thing the people in the rooms I just described pay attention to. What comes next is going to ask more of you than the first six chapters did. I am not going to pretend otherwise.

What I will promise you is that I will walk slow. I will not skip steps. I will introduce you to the people I want to introduce you to one at a time, in the kinds of rooms they actually work in, with the kinds of details that make a person real. I will not ask you to believe anything I have not first shown you. By the time we get to the part of the story that is hard to believe, you will have walked there step by step, and you will, I think, find that you believe it the way you would believe anything you had seen happen with your own eyes.

The next chapter opens in a room I have not been in. The room is real. The man in it is, for our purposes, a man I am going to call Daniel.

We meet him on a Tuesday afternoon in a village in the Bekaa valley, in eastern Lebanon, in the spring of the year that JD Vance was named to the ticket.

He is sitting in a folding chair against the back wall.