The Media Marine

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J.D. Vance is weird, sure. He’s weird about women, babies, and cats. Here is a real sentence he once tweeted: “I can say with confidence that daylight savings time reduces fertility by at least 10 percent.” He has defended his drink of choice, Diet Mountain Dew, as not being racist. (Nobody said it was.) When he enters a donut shop, he does not know what to do. Since he was chosen as Donald Trump’s running mate, in July, and his awkward rhetoric reached Americans across the political spectrum, Vance has floundered. Tim Walz—Vance’s counterpart on the Democratic side, whom he debates on the first of October—likely secured his position by pointing out that weirdness. Online, Walz is decisively winning the meme war, which is no predictor of the election, but feels like momentum anyway. The “weird” label is an effective story for the Harris campaign; it’s become the media’s story as well. 

And yet Vance is not that weird at all. Rather, his shape-shifting normality is the reason for his success. In Hillbilly Elegy, his 2016 memoir, he packaged his impoverished, volatile childhood into a bootstraps story of American triumph that culminated with his induction to professional society at Yale Law. From adulthood on, his background is standard-issue politico: He’s a Marine with a law degree and billionaire friends. His wife, a former Yale classmate, clerked for John Roberts and Brett Kavanaugh. He’s a Catholic convert with three kids and a German shepherd. He articulates a reasoned, if odious, policy agenda. I’d bet that, if you are reading this, there is someone like Vance among your contacts: an ambitious striver and bullish ideologue accumulating Ivy League credentials and business connections.

Vance’s political pitch is that he’s fundamentally not an establishment type, that he’s a working-class guy from Middletown, Ohio, who understands Americans’ economic woes and social alienation from the coasts. That story becomes less believable the more reporters uncover about him. But there is some truth to his grievance, insofar as he complains that liberal elites in media and politics don’t always have the interests of the working class at heart. Those who run newsrooms and Senate committees are overall more affluent and better-educated than the country at large, and that may well make them out of touch with many Americans. “I don’t think Vance is completely wrong about how a lot of people who went to Harvard and then on to Columbia Journalism School see the people he’s talking about,” James Pogue, a journalist from Ohio who reported on Vance for Vanity Fair in 2022, told me. “That is a big problem for American media and a larger problem for American politics.”

The problem is not without a handy, if flawed, solution: faced with an absence of authority, the press finds a spokesperson. Vance conveniently offered himself up at just the right moment. As Bryan Metzger, a politics reporter for Business Insider, has pointed out, when Vance was on tour in Iraq, he served in public affairs—and, as he wrote in his memoir, trained in “how to stay on message.” Metzger told me, “He had known for a very long time how media relations works and how to deal with media in a way that I don’t think the average politician even really knows. He’s a bit more savvy with all this stuff.” As a case in point: Vance recently defended Trump for spreading an outrageous lie about Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, eating cats and dogs—at once acknowledging that it was a falsehood and attesting to its value in driving journalists’ attention. (Springfield has since been overwhelmed by bomb threats.) “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do,” he told Dana Bash, on CNN. When she asked him about the word “create,” he doubled down: “I say that we’re creating a story, meaning we’re creating the American media focusing on it.” That is deeply cynical, a powerful whirl of spin. But also, Vance presents just enough press criticism—about the manipulability of reporters—to suggest a kind of flattery, a genuine understanding of how the work is done.

Back in 2013, Vance began writing for the conservative magazine National Review. In February 2016, he published a column in USA Today—“Trump speaks for those Bush betrayed”—separating himself from Trump while establishing his bona fides. “As a Marine Corps veteran who grew up in a struggling Rust Belt town, I understand why many adore him,” Vance wrote. “What unites Trump’s voters is a sense of alienation from America’s wealthy and powerful.” That April, his byline appeared in the New York Times; he went on to write regularly for the opinion section. As the Hillbilly Elegy publicity campaign unfurled, during the summer of Trump’s rise, Vance positioned himself as a cultural ambassador who could channel the thoughts and feelings of the heartland for the major outlets Trump vilified: CNN, MSNBC, NPR, Slate, Vox. An excerpt of the book ran in the Washington Post.

Vance filled the dead air left by Trump’s unwillingness to grant interviews, however imperfect a representative for rural white America he actually was. And just as Trump has condemned the media despite owing his success to it—and continuing, all through his presidency and beyond, to engage one way or another—Vance has managed to be critical of the press while remaining a major beneficiary. In 2016, liberal outlets gave him an audience to decry Trump; they also offered rave reviews. Jennifer Senior, in the Times, praised Hillbilly Elegy for being “a civilized reference guide for an uncivilized election.” The book became a runaway bestseller. (Dissenting opinions included Hari Kunzru in The Guardian, who warned against extrapolating a larger political meaning from Vance’s story.) This summer, when Vance became the vice presidential nominee, Jon Allsop wrote for CJR that Trump “picked Vance because elite media interlocutors often seem to take him seriously even when disagreeing with his ideas, a function of his polished, debate-meet affectations,” and cited an observation by Trump’s son Don Jr., who said that Vance is “better than almost any of our people” at defending Trump on liberal TV shows.

Vance has always been a creature of the mainstream media, and he remains one now. From the start of his career, he has cleverly leveraged his identity as an escapee from a backwater town to give his perspective on the white working class. However high his star has ascended—when Hillbilly Elegy came out, he was a principal at Mithril Capital, Peter Thiel’s firm—he has accused the liberals around him of out-of-touch elitism. And still, even as he claims to speak in the interest of the working-class communities he grew up with, his socially conservative and anti-labor policies do nothing of the sort. What they do is provide rhetorical ammunition with which to take aim at his political opponents. Vance is not so weird—he’s just a pundit who knows how to keep the calls coming. 

Vance offered a digestible explanation of Trump-supporter psychology at a time when explanations were in high demand. Crucially, in making his case, his rhetoric—soliloquies on salad-fork faux pas during his Yale years—bypassed a number of difficult realities, including white American bigotry. “You cannot understand what’s happening now without first reading J.D. Vance,” Rod Dreher claimed in a 2016 interview with Vance for the American Conservative. “His book does for poor white people what Ta-Nehisi Coates’s book did for poor black people.” The comparison was a false one, and yet it reflected a view commonly found in the media. 

Seyward Darby—the editor of The Atavist and the author of Sisters in Hate (2020), about women in the modern conservative movement—told me that when Hillbilly Elegy came out, she was frustrated to see journalists giving more attention to Vance’s autobiography than to his political views. The sociological explanations he provided for the struggles of working-class people were “a more palatable version of events than the reality of the situation, that people are driven by fear, by grievance, by racism,” she said. “It was a way of thinking about what was going on that softened the edges.”

Later on, journalists would find that the importance of the rural poor to Trump’s base had been exaggerated and support from the middle class underrecognized. (“Donald J. Trump won the presidency by riding an enormous wave of support among white working-class voters,” Nate Cohn declared in an exit-poll analysis for the Times.) A Washington Post review of election survey data showed that in fact, just 25 percent of Trump voters were white people without college degrees making below-average incomes; the victory had been carried largely by affluent Republicans. “It’s time to let go” of the narrative that “working-class Americans swept Trump into the White House,” the authors urged. But Vance’s position as a messenger for Trump’s base had already been secured. He often wasn’t saying anything different about the problems of declining Rust Belt towns than Democrats were, yet his position as an outsider speaking for outsiders made his words feel believable and easy to absorb.

After Trump’s win, the open-minded curiosity the liberal press had previously extended toward the Americans who voted him into office was sharply withdrawn. Vance attests to feeling resentment toward the media in the aftermath. “People were looking for some interpretive lens for Trump’s voters that never really asked them to challenge their priors or to rethink what they felt about those people,” Vance told Ross Douthat this year, in the Times, reflecting on that period. “And I realized that I was being used as this whisperer of a phenomenon that some people really did want to understand but some people didn’t.” 

Vance drew closer to Trumpism. Around 2018, he abandoned CNN and MSNBC in favor of Tucker Carlson Tonight, where he was a guest forty-six times in five years. He also adopted Carlson’s appreciation of conspiracy-theorizing and culture-warring. It was in dialogue with Carlson that Vance went on his “childless cat ladies” diatribe; later, he said that the “hidden secret” of the COVID vaccine was that “the government has conspired with the pharmaceutical industry to force the most expensive treatments.” He appealed to an audience receptive to stories of dark plots engineered by elites, as he accused Joe Biden’s border policy of opening the country to “illegal drugs” and invoked the “great replacement theory” to cast immigration as a Democratic scheme to populate the country with left-leaning voters. 

In 2020, Vance voted for Trump. The following year, he waged his Senate campaign in Ohio, funded by fifteen million dollars from Thiel and bolstered by a close friendship with Don Jr. He rescinded his earlier condemnation of Trump and happily accepted his backing. News outlets scrambled to explain how we’d all so badly misjudged him. A sit-down with Vance in Time, for example, tried to get the pulse on this new Vance after his “all-too-convenient conversion.”

In an insightful profile of Vance for the Washington Post Magazine, Simon van Zuylen–Wood observed that the media’s primary question in 2021—“What happened to J.D. Vance?”—cast his radicalized turn as entirely novel and fraudulent, ignoring the ways in which it was consistent with his political trajectory. The almost mournful tone of the coverage of Vance’s angrier and harder-right persona was journalism’s elegy for the Hillbilly Elegy era. Gone was Vance the interpreter; in his place stood a freshly bearded, angry online troll who condemned Wall Street as well as trans rights. The press felt betrayed. But this embittered Vance had been there all along, van Zuylen–Wood wrote, and now he emerged as one of the primary leaders of a young movement of national conservatives driven by an antipathy for neoliberalism, progressivism, and wokism. “He’s somebody who’s been in the media gaze for almost a decade,” van Zuylen–Wood told me. “I think there’s a kind of familiarity-breeds-contempt thing on both sides.” (Vance’s former roommate Josh McLaurin, now a Georgia state senator, told Vox: “The through line between former J.D. and current J.D. is anger.”) 

Ian Ward, who profiled Vance for Politico, noted that coverage of Vance has tended to group him along with other young senators such as Josh Hawley, Marco Rubio, and Tom Cotton. “But Vance’s far-reaching vision for the future of the GOP—and the political strategy and infrastructure that he has built in Washington around that vision—makes him largely unique among congressional Republicans,” Ward wrote. What remains relatively undercovered is Vance’s arguably more influential role as an emerging leader of the New Right. “Vance is thinking about his political project in terms of decades and generations,” Ward told me. “On any individual day of the campaign, I’ve tried to foreground what I think his longer-term plans are.”

It’s that long-term outlook that always risks getting lost in the unfolding excitement of election campaigns. Today, the opportunity to poke fun at Vance’s weirdness provides a welcome change of tone from Democrats’ warnings about the collapse of democracy. But the Kamala Harris vibe shift is not the end of the story. “Since 2016 onward, there’s been a tendency to either mock or situate right-wing figures as a joke,” Darby said. “This always frustrates me, when people are covering the far right. There’s a tendency to neuter the threat by focusing on what is weird, what is ridiculous, what is embarrassing. And at the end of the day, we saw that that did not work with Trump.”

Trump’s selection of Vance as his running mate delivered another round of journalistic reassessment. In explaining his adopted allegiance to Trump, Vance told Fox News, “I bought into the media’s lies and distortions.” He hurled more insults toward journalists, even as he criticized Harris for being too press-shy. But despite the bulldog persona he performs on the campaign trail, he still relies on mainstream channels to get his message out. 

Talking to reporters has become routine for Vance, and he’s devoted much of his public life to speaking to outlets from across the political spectrum. Journalists who have profiled him or covered him on Capitol Hill told me that he’s generally a thoughtful and interesting person to engage with, more so than many politicians. He’s someone who enjoys debating ideas and policy. Sitting down for interviews in person, he can be genial and forthcoming, joking around. “He’s a pretty good code-switcher,” van Zuylen–Wood said. “The code-switching is a natural product of his bifurcated identity. I think the heart of him is all about his bifurcated identity. I don’t think it’s false. He’s spent time in both worlds.”

Vance is, in the end, quite comfortable with the media. How well that translates to the people he claims to speak for is another matter. The latest FiveThirtyEight poll finds that 45 percent of Americans disapprove of Vance, while just 34 percent approve. However much Trump may admire his blue eyes (“You are one handsome son of a bitch,” Trump has said), Vance has proved to be charmless and humorless, going on rants about daycare, dropping references to Nazi academics, and theorizing about “the postmenopausal female.” And yet, for conservatives who are skeptical of national media and interested in what Vance has to say, the ridicule he’s received in the press for his off-putting comments may serve as more of an endorsement than a detraction. “Attacks from the media serve, in some senses, to bolster his reputation,” Ward told me.

As vice president, Vance will surely be able to translate Trump’s chaotic style into coherent and effective governance: MAGA 2.0, updated for the next generation of conservatives. But even if Vance’s political career stalls or he does not turn out to be the most effective delivery system for the ideas of the New Right, the media should not forget that these ideas will persist beyond the current campaign. During his short time in the Senate, Vance spoke often on the floor, and introduced bills that served to draw attention to culture war debates over gender-affirming care, DEI, and mask mandates. He has been consistent in his opposition to free-market economics, at times partnering with progressive Democrats including Elizabeth Warren (though he opposes the PRO Act, the most meaningful legislation in support of unions). Carlson, assessing Vance’s performance as a senator, has said, “He’s by far the smartest and the deepest of any I’ve ever met.” Focusing on the entertainment value of his embarrassing slip-ups or shrugging Vance off as a goon distracts from the seriousness of his efforts. “I think Vance is multifaceted and has interesting things to say, and also obviously has flaws,” Metzger said. “But the impression that everyone has of him is that he talks about childless cat ladies and, you know, the couch jokes. It’s all very shallow.” 

Vance has always been especially good at finding his next audience. This fall, that includes newly Trump-curious groups. One mistake the press made in 2016 was to reduce Trump’s America to a single demographic represented by one smooth-talking head; in 2024 we must acknowledge the diversity of his appeal. Vance may be “the media guy’s idea of the rural American,” as described by Paolo Cremidis, a political consultant, on a recent episode of the podcast Time to Say Goodbye. But a more realistic picture of Trump’s supporters—though they include, yes, uninformed voters and consumers of “alternative” media—shows a group that is economically and racially diverse. Black and Hispanic Americans are supporting Trump in significantly higher numbers than they did in 2020. It has been a surprising election season, and there will surely be more surprises to come. By now, though, Vance’s chronic influence should be an exception.

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Camille Bromley is a freelance writer and editor based in New York.