'Last straw': JD Vance’s best friend reveals moment he switched from Never Trump to MAGA

16 July 2024

Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) was once a face of the Never Trump movement, only to suddenly pivot to becoming one of former President Donald Trump's biggest supporters, and now his 2024 running mate. His shift was reportedly prompted not by politics, but by pop culture.

The Washington Post recently reported that the Ohio Republican — whose memoir "Hillbilly Elegy" was made into a movie directed by Ron Howard — was hoping for the film adaptation of his book to become universally celebrated by the Hollywood establishment as his book was by beltway media. But one of his closest friends said Vance was devastated when the film was laughed at by reviewers.

"When the 'Hillbilly Elegy' movie came out on Netflix in 2020, it was not just critically panned but greeted with intense online mockery, and the tenuous cultural diplomacy achieved by the book seemed to unravel for good," wrote the Post's Simon van Zuylen-Wood, noting that the Rotten Tomatoes audience score was 83% while the critics’ score was 25 percent. "According to Vance’s best friend from Yale, Jamil Jivani, the wounding commentary was the 'last straw' in his falling-out with elites."

"Hillbilly Elegy" is about Vance's upbringing in a low-income suburb of Cincinnati, Ohio, and how his experience growing up adjacent to working-class struggle and drug addiction shaped his worldview. The bestselling book made Vance a so-called "Trump whisperer" who was frequently invited onto cable news panels to help explain Trump's appeal to blue-collar white voters. And in that role, Vance rarely held back in his criticism of then-candidate Trump.

In one unearthed message to a friend in 2016, Vance referred to Trump as "America's Hitler" and "a cynical a—hole like Nixon." In audio that recently resurfaced from that same year while he was promoting his book, Vance agreed with Kentucky Sports Radio host Matt Jones when he repeatedly called Trump a "total fraud."

"I don't think he actually cares about folks," Vance said.

But Jivani said that Vance's resentment with the elite liberal establishment happened when he was at Yale, and he frequently encountered coastal liberals who he felt looked down on communities like the one where he grew up.

“You’re sitting in a seminar room, you’ve got a professor who’s written a million books, surrounded by 20 students from San Francisco, New York, mostly, all pontificating about how to help poor people in America," Jivani said. “Yale’s approach is that judges, senators, policymakers can save the world. They completely omit the role of family, community and culture in people’s lives.”

"[Vance] is... illiberal in his instincts,” he added. “I don’t mean it as a slur. I mean it in a technical sense. He is skeptical of the political project of enlightenment liberalism, like, 'We’re all just autonomous individuals trying to self-actualize and maximize our own interests.'”

Click here to read the Post's full report (subscription required).

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