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It's easy to see why Trump chose JD Vance, the ‘craven and calculated’ hillbilly — as his running mate

Marianne Thamm
By Marianne Thamm
28 Jul 2024
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Trump picked Vance as his running mate even though the young senator previously slandered Potus 45 as ‘America’s Hitler’ – because he has qualities Trump admires in himself and others.

Donald Trump’s running mate, Ohio senator JD Vance, is a self-confessed “hillbilly”, as evidenced by the title of his 2016 bestselling memoir, Hillbilly Elegy.

It would be safe to assume that many of the voters who are attracted to Trump believe in the cultural mythology of the “self-made” man (yup, it’s still a man’s world in the Republican Party).

To Maga supporters, Trump is the epitome of the self-created “tycoon”, regardless of whether this self was built on grifting, fraud, criminality, tax evasion, serial sexual exploitation or flogging branded Bibles, flags and now even special limited-edition “assassination sneakers”.

Three wives, two of them immigrants from Eastern Europe, five children and numerous scandalous affairs later, including with a porn star whom he paid off, Trump is the common man’s common president.

Poverty as self-made injury


For Vance, being a hillbilly is about pulling yourself up by the bootstraps and out of your circumstances, particularly when they are dire.

He has bought wholesale the myth of opportunity and social mobility in “the greatest country on Earth”, as he describes the US. In this world, poverty is a self-made destiny or injury, a personal failure and a kick in the face of the “American Dream” and all who dream it. It’s your own fault if you are poor in the US. 

Structural inequality is ignored in this fictitious “classless” republic, and race, gender and immigration are deployed as flashpoints of division. 

Vance (39) has written about his troubled childhood with an abusive mother, who brought a succession of stepfathers into their home. He was later raised by his grandmother in Kentucky. 

His father was a religious extremist who despised homosexuals, Darwin, “Clintonian liberalism” and extramarital sex. 

Read more: Is JD Vance the Sister Carrie of 21st-century American politics?

Vance clawed his way out of this class morass, serving in the Marines in Iraq, moving on to government-funded education at Ohio State University and then the prestigious Yale Law School, before reaching the US apex as a “venture capitalist”.

Southern Ohio is in central Appalachia, a source of so many familiar American tropes and stereotypes of white poverty, resilience, guns, incest, moonshine brewing, extreme logging and coal mines. It is also a landscape of uneducated, remote communities barely surviving and battling with drug addiction and delinquency.

You need someone else to blame and Trump is their chief finger pointer.

Many blindly support this convicted felon because he makes them feel clever, makes them feel seen, even though they are invisible to him in real life. They are stepping stones to power.

No one needs to read Trump’s lips as from them tumbles familiar shibboleths – passwords for a community bonded to the idea that “civilised” America is in decline and needs an authoritarian leader to slap it into shape.

Spot the difference


It is not difficult to see why Trump picked Vance as his running mate, even though the young senator previously slandered Potus 45 as “America’s Hitler” and described him as “cultural heroin”.

It is all water off Trump’s back. He has been called worse, but when you are the main guy grabbing pussy, hanging out in casinos, playing golf, paying hush money, stealing state secrets and having tea with Vladimir Putin, Vance’s insults are lollipops.

Vance’s about-turn has been labelled “craven and calculated”, which are qualities Trump admires in himself and others.

So, what is the difference between the hillbillies, rednecks and white trash of the US? Nancy Isenberg, professor of history at Louisiana State University and author of White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America, is an expert on this cohort.

The hillbilly, she opines, is not to be confused with the redneck, the hardworking guy who gets sunburnt. And neither with white trash, which today is a derogatory term for white poverty. It was once deployed by British colonists to describe the people they dispatched to the “new world” – now the US.

These were “surplus” people, the “idle poor” of England who were sent to the “wastelands” of America to work the land on the frontier. The expectation for them was “horizontal” and not “upward” mobility.

1950s revival


The local equivalent of the hillbilly, the “unsophisticated” rural person, would be the “amaqaba” in isiXhosa – the people of red ochre featured in Zakes Mda’s The Heart of Redness.

In Afrikaans they would have been a “bywoner” (squatter on someone else’s land) or “maplotter” – those common “zef” folks down the road who wear their whiteness like an ubermensch. 

Vance has written the foreword to the ominous Heritage Foundation’s new book about “Project 2025”, a national conservative blueprint for taking the US back to the 1950s.

With Trump surviving the most bizarre assassination attempt, a deep cognitive dissonance has descended on the US, which will decide, in November, to either turn back the clock or hurtle headlong into the future. DM

This story first appeared in our weekly Daily Maverick 168 newspaper, which is available countrywide for R35.

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