USAnalysis

Ohio storyteller JD Vance makes Appalachia-to-vice-president pitch to ‘forgotten’ Americans

Donald Trump’s running mate and self-styled hillbilly gives condensed life story to Republican convention over almost 40 minutes

US election: Vice presidential nominee JD Vance acknowledges the crowd after speaking at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee. Photograph: EPA
Keith Duggan's picture
Keith Duggan in Milwaukee
Thu Jul 18 2024 - 06:53

They had waited for him all day, the Ohio storyteller with the catchy name and the pale blue eyes who had somehow been chosen from the masses by Donald J. Trump.

The new vice-presidential pick, JD Vance, is still a novice in the highest level of American politics and was on Wednesday night still a mystery to many of the delegates gathered beneath the cowboy hats and placards and regalia of Trumplandia.

It was well after 9pm when he was introduced by his wife, Usha Vance, and he started to tell them his story: the self-styled hillbilly, a throwback word with connotations of hayricks and greasy rags and a very old television show.

Vance spoke for almost 40 minutes, about 15 minutes more than he should have done. He had some good moments, warming the crowd with a good old yarn about his Mamaw, his grandmother and the moral force in his life, who died just as Vance was serving in the US marines. Afterwards, they found she had some 19 firearms stashed in various corners of her home.

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“And we wondered what was going on,” Vance continued through the howls of approval.

“And it occurred to us that towards the end of her life Mamaw could not get around so well. And so, this frail old woman made sure that no matter where she was, she was within arm’s length of whatever she needed to protect her family. That’s what we fight for! That’s America’s spirit.”

Better still, Vance told the well-known tale at this stage of his mother’s struggles with various forms of addictions through his adolescence. Towards the end of his speech, he was able to wait as the camera turned to the gallery where former president Trump and invited guests sat.

Mike Johnson, the House speaker, who can transform himself into a particularly obsequious butler in certain situations, invited Vance’s mother, present and ten years in sobriety, to stand up. This was another powerful moment and, undoubtedly, an extraordinary one for the 39-year-old vice-presidential candidate’s mother.

And it helped to sell the idea that from the vast wasteland of the Rust Belt, Donald Trump had plucked a saviour. Vance skipped through his progress – state college through the GI Bill, Yale law and then a sensationally popular 2016 memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, which was hailed as containing an authentic, compelling voice who could explain the disenchantment of the neglected American heartland, once the furnace, the engine room and breadbasket of America.

“I started businesses to create jobs in the kind of places I grew up in,” Vance told the crowd.

“Now my work taught me that there is so much talent and grit in the American heartland, there really is. But for these places to thrive, my friends, we need a leader who fights for the people who built this country. We need a leader who is not in the pockets of big business but answers to the working man, union and non-union alike. A leader who won’t sell out to multinational corporations but will stand up for American companies and American industry.”

And on it went, a condensed autobiography spliced with frequent tributes to the vision of Donald Trump, of whom he had been virulently critical during his giddy year in the spotlight promoting his book.

Vance’s argument is he has experienced an epiphany since then: that he was one of the millions duped by the liberal media into believing that Donald Trump was a disaster for America. This narrative might be more believable had Vance spent the previous decade in some notional Appalachian wilderness cabin, scribbling his masterpiece and then emerging bright eyed and blinking to be feted by polite society. But by 2016, Vance had lived several lives and was canny enough to make up his own mind.

So the contrary view, and one which the Democrats will level at him this summer, is that behind the pale blue eyes and plausible articulacy lies an emptiness – that behind the veneer of newly acquired Trumpian values and ideals is nothing at all except a sort of instinctive ambition.

Unless the Democrat ticket changes dramatically – and that became more likely as news broke that President Biden had contracted Covid – Vance will debate Kamala Harris in September.

And irrespective of who debates JD Vance, it is probable the campaign writers are parsing every page of Hillbilly Elegy, in which Vance also levels accusations of self pity and fecklessness at the communities he now claims to champion.

In fact, the only people who emerge from the pages of Elegy with shining virtue are his Mamaw (unquestionably so, even if her grandson did tell the GOP crowd about the time she promised to run over a ne’er-do-well drug dealing pal of his, and that “nobody would ever find out”) and JD Vance himself.

There’s a sense in that book, written when he was already a success in life, that he could not quite get over himself.

Appalachia is a region containing 24 million people. It seems breathtakingly reductive to paint entire impoverished communities with the same brush. Here’s the great Barbara Kingsolver talking in a Slate magazine interview about that very issue: the outside eyes making easy assumptions about a heritage in which she, like Vance, grew up.

“Looking at Appalachia from the outside, all people know about us or think about us, is that we are, I don’t know, backwards, ignorant degenerates, if you believe Deliverance or people with such limited worldview that we can’t even imagine bettering our circumstances, if you believe JD Vance in Hillbilly Elegy.

“The portrait that is consistently painted of us is toothless, hopeless, the butt of every joke. I live here – that’s not who we are. And part of why I write about this place is to counter those stereotypes and show the world a portrait of us with some subtlety.”

Subtlety is the word – and it’s a commodity often in scarce supply in Trumplandia. In fact, on Wednesday night, the oldest and youngest speakers supplied it: Bill Pekrul, a 98-year-old second World War veteran who spoke with quiet class and anger about his disappointment in the Biden regime, and Kai Trump, the former president’s 17-year-old granddaughter who spoke with unpretentious affection and sincerity about what he means to her.

In a curious way, the understated delivery of both those addresses exposed the sheen of many of the main speakers. Her father, Donald Trump jnr. has a good voice and is earnest and has the best slicked-back hair since Michael Douglas played Gordon Gekko. But he lacks the old man’s snake-charming capacity and delivers his speech like he is still practising in front of the mirror.

And as JD Vance spoke on and on, the barmen in the gorgeous old brewery-era riverside hostelries drummed their fingers waiting for the thirsty Republicans to be let loose into the night and Trump’s eyes narrowed a few times until his new guy finally returned to the point and spoke about “all the forgotten communities in Michigan, Wisconsin and Ohio and every corner of our nation: I will be a vice-president who never forgets where I came from”.

That’s why he was up there.

The hope and expectation are that his sudden elevation on to the world stage will deliver enough votes to secure those ailing industrial powerhouses and that they trust that this nouveau combination – the billionaire and the hillbilly – will make their America great again. Time will tell.