They loved him before they loathed him. Media fangirls swooned for JD Vance like disaffected 15-year-olds with unrequited love as they crushed on the “star quarterback.” In 2016 JD was everything they wanted in a Republican:
- JD was no Trump fan. Orange Man Bad.
- Although JD was a straight white man (and therefore an intersectional outlier), he had grown up dirt poor. He wasn’t born with a silver spoon in his mouth, his was a spork from McDonald’s. A real-life, honest-to-goodness hillbilly.
- Most of his family influencers were women.
- He enlisted in the Marine Corps during the global war on terror.
- He had risen from his hillbilly origin to attend Yale Law.
- He married the daughter of immigrants – a successful “person of color.”
- He wrote a best-selling book detailing his life.
- And, in 2016, he had no political ambitions.
The swoon was palpable. Eight years ago, Vance was on his book tour. One interviewer was Joy Reid. Reid was smitten. In a very un-Reid-like discussion, Reid asked questions and even allowed her guest to speak. Megyn Kelly featured that old clip at the 42:30 mark during her own interview with Vance. Reid said:
[W]hat one of the things that’s really fascinating about your story, JD, is how similar some of the pathologies you talk about um are to the pathologies that normally people assign to African-Americans, right, that you know these ideas about the way you’re raised… You’re raised mostly by your grandparents, um, the way that you were able to use opportunity like the military to get a college degree. That’s very familiar across racial lines, so why do you suppose there’s such a huge gulf and distance ideologically between African-Americans, um, and people from where you uh that like the ones you came from.