417. The Real JD Vance: America’s Next President? (Part 1)

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If Donald Trump dropped dead,

this guy is automatically president.

How has he

become what he's become from this background?

I'm sitting in the back of this police cruiser.

They've just arrested my mom.

The relief of having survived another day.

This is a story about something which we don't often talk about in America, which is class.

I came from a southern Ohio steel town, and it's a town that's really struggling in a lot of ways.

Trump, I think that he's leading the white working class to a very dark place.

I'm a never-Trump guy.

I never liked him.

But in the end, the main thing you need to understand about JD Garnes is, given the choice between his intellectual statements and power,

He chooses power every time.

I was wrong about Donald Trump.

Senator, this is an evolution.

Past comments that you've made.

You've said, idiot if you voted for him, might be America's Hitler.

This is where this other side of his personality comes through.

He's reverting to blame, anger.

We're seeing migrants kidnap our dogs and cats.

They're eating the dogs.

I think the election was stolen from Trump.

We're effectively run in this country by a bunch of childless cat ladies.

He needs to prove absolute loyalty.

And what I worry about is the threat from within.

Have you said thank you once?

You are part of the J.D.

Vance story.

A Twitter beef I didn't expect to see this week.

Rory Stewart, not as clever as he thinks, says J.D.

Vance.

This was the final destruction of the centrist dads because J.D.

Vance had bossed me.

But there's a bigger story, which is the story about this whole alt-right movement.

Vance does not exist really without Teal, either financially or politically.

Because this guy believes that America should be led by a monarch, which of course Trump believes as well.

He sees him, frankly, as a future king because he says Vance can tell the story of America.

And in doing so, he crosses the cusp into a whole new vision of the world at the center of which is not democracy, but the CEO, the authoritarian, the monarch.

Hi there, Alistair here.

Now, as we said in yesterday's Question Time episode, we are doing finally our first ever mini-series for members of the Resters Politics Plus, and it's all about dead air J.D.

Vance.

That's right, and it's really great stuff.

I really enjoyed putting it together.

It's almost us making a sort of mini documentary on J.D.

Vance.

If you'd like to hear the first episode right now, just head to theresterspolitics.com to join the Restus Politics Plus, where you'll find our cheapest rates.

New episodes of our series will be dropping every Friday morning for members.

We really enjoyed recording the series.

It charts J.D.

Vance's very humble beginnings in the Appalachians, tracks his career and his influences all the way up to his role as vice president, where he calls out European leaders in Munich and chastises Zelensky in the Oval Office and tries to work out how to stay in with Donald Trump.

Here's a clip.

Hope you enjoy it.

Vance is

many things, many, many things for which we will be profoundly critical.

But he's also smart.

I mean,

he's a very clever person and he writes very elegantly.

We'll get on to that.

And he has these very interesting ideas.

And for British listeners, there's some interesting parallels.

He's got some echoes with figures like Dominic Cummings and other people actually within the New Right movement, the Conservative Party that we can talk about a little bit later.

In American politics, as you've said, he's part of this amazing development of, on the one hand, conservative Catholicism.

He calls himself a baby Catholic.

He's a born-again Catholic.

And I recognize very much that I am a baby Catholic, that there are things about the faith that I don't know.

But he's also got this whole other thing, a whole economic theory of the world, whole political theory of the world, and he spouts it out with the most incredible, again a bit like Donny Cumps, the most unbelievable intellectual references.

He's like referring to Saint Augustine, he's reading relatively obscure hackers and coders from Silicon Valley, he worships a man called Peter Thiel.

So it's a really good route at a moment where liberal democracy, the sort of centrist politics that you and I believe in and grew up in, is cracking.

Here is somebody suggesting

what some of the alternative ideas out there might be.

And we'll get a chance to look into whether they actually stack up, how much they contradict.

And also he's having to ride this Trumpian horse and stay close to him.

So he is on lots of levels of very interesting character.

So let's go right back to the beginning.

He was born August the 2nd, 1984.

His name was James Donald Bowman.

And I'm not sure how much I trust somebody who changes their name quite as regularly as this guy does, but there are reasons why he changes his name.

And that relates to his mother who gets through

men at a very, very, very, very speedy rate.

I think she has five marriages, plenty of blokes in between.

And he says that he, he actually, there's one very moving part of the book where he says that, you know, I hated school, but I hated home even more.

And the worst thing about it was this revolving door of so-called father figures.

On this for a second, there are many different things you can talk about in J.D.

Vance's background.

And we'll get on to talk about what it means to be Scott-Irish, what Ohio and Kentucky were like, what the opioid crisis was like, but let's start just with what you've said with the mother and the different men and her drug addiction.

One thing that people have said about her billiardogy when they're being critical is that it plays a little bit too much to

stereotypes about what in the US would be called welfare queens.

So some American commentators reading this says this basically portrays a world of every conservative prejudice about people living on welfare, single-parent families, drug abuse, unemployment, multiple parents, poor educational performance, and a community that's often, as seems to be in the book, kind of almost opting out.

I mean, how did you read, how did he analyse this kind of poverty, this kind of world?

Well, it's, of course, now that he is what he's become, it's kind of hard to...

genuinely to work through it without knowing him really well, which neither of us do.

I mean, he wrote this book when he was 31.

at that stage, not even in politics.

But you read it, now that he is a politician, you kind of think, oh, I can see why he wrote this book.

But very few publishers are going to take a memoir from a 31-year-old who hasn't done much.

It had to be very well written, which it is.

It had to be a really interesting story, which it is.

And it had to say something deeper about America, which it does.

I have a very strong sense, may load, page 146 to page 148.

It's almost like

you lot deserve the life you've got for the choices that you make so in that part of the book he's almost saying and this is quite important for his politics and he makes this point at other points in his life that there are two ways of looking at the community he grew up in one of them is the conservative view which is it's their fault because then pull themselves out by their bootstraps and to get on their bikes and then there's the liberal view which is that they're completely victims of their economic and social circumstances and he sometimes says he doesn't like either view but give us a

very he's very much of that of that form world view.

So he talks about living in a world of truly irrational behaviour.

We spend our way into the poor house.

We buy giant TVs and iPads.

Our children wear nice clothes thanks to high-interest credit cards.

We purchase homes we don't need, refinance them for spending money, then declare bankruptcy, leaving the houses full of garbage.

Thrift is inimical to our being.

We spend to pretend that we're upper class.

And when the dust clears, when bankruptcy hips, or a family member bails us out of our stupidity, there's nothing left over, nothing for tuition, no investment to grow our wealth, no rainy day fund.

We know we shouldn't spend like this.

Sometimes we beat ourselves up every we do it anyway.

And then he goes on, and he goes on and on and on like this.

And eventually, he says, we talk about the value of hard work, but we tell ourselves the reason we're not working is some perceived unfairness.

Obama shut down the coal mines or all the jobs went to the Chinese.

These are the lies we tell ourselves to solve the cognitive dissonance, the broken connection between the world we see and the values we preach.

Now, that is diametrically opposed to what he's saying now.

This is a sort of Trump, you know, blame the Chinese, blame Clinton, blame Obama, blame globalization, etc.

And there's a lot of that in the book.

Well, so it's let's just sit with it for a second.

So, what's it?

What actually is your sense of his background?

I mean, we've interviewed Angela Rayna, the British Deputy Prime Minister, who comes from a very, very extreme example of deprivation.

I'd say it's on a level.

Okay.

At least.

At least.

Okay.

And just remind us, Miss Angela Rayna, that's that's

a mother who had serious learning difficulties, struggling to get food on the table.

Not having a bath for a week.

Lots of unemployment of different generations in the family, travelling families.

I would say that as it comes over in the book, and you know, query whether he's exaggerated, that has been said, I've got no idea of knowing.

But what comes over the book is a level of dysfunction and violence.

And you almost, I mean, you have to hand it it to him, but how he has become what he's become coming from this background.

So, just to go back to his name, he starts off with one name, James Donald.

The Bowman name then goes because when his mum remarries, his dad is her second husband.

The third husband, when she marries him, they change their name.

So he becomes

John David Hamill because she didn't want Donald.

This is quite ironic given the applause of Donald and his life loud, but Donald was the name of his real dad and she didn't want any reference to him at all.

And Donald's the name of his real dad.

That's quite interesting too.

I don't know.

There we go.

There we go.

There we go.

So Don Bowman, he disappears and gives him up for adoption, his real dad.

He later forms a relationship with him, which is really interesting, and it sort of upsets the mum a bit.

That's the second name.

And then the third, what happens is that she becomes so troubled, so violent, so unpredictable.

And she almost kills him in a car, doesn't she?

She almost kills herself.

She almost kills him.

So she tries to kill him.

Right.

He goes into this complete stranger's house, sort of screaming, Help me, help me.

My mum's trying to kill me.

And she calls the police and she also calls what we call the curses.

The stranger calls the police.

The stranger calls the police.

Then what happens is mama and papa is what he calls his grandparents.

They basically take him over.

May Mor is the woman that he describes as having a Bible and whatever it is, 24 guns in the house, right?

She carries a gun.

Right.

She has shot people.

The dad is an alcoholic.

The grandfather is an alcoholic.

I think he eventually stops drinking, quite violent again.

There's a lot of violence in the book.

There's one scene where he's describing being in the car with his mother, his sister, and his grandmother.

And the mother is driving while she's basically hitting the kids because of something that's done to certainly.

And then the mother, the grandmother, is hitting her.

Right.

So you have this sense of real violence.

The other thing that's really interesting about the thing about when his mum tried to kill him in a car and he got out and ran off is that he then is very, very open about the fact that he lied in court.

To protect his mother.

To protect his mother.

And actually dotted through the book, there's quite a lot of, you know, I told this, I said this when it wasn't true.

I lied about this, I lied about that.

But it's a level of dysfunction that is...

I mean,

you will certainly know people through your constituency work.

And, you know, I've met people who, but this is on a scale.

And of course, what he says is this was not abnormal.

There were worse-off families.

There were poorer families.

There were more dysfunctional families.

And actually, when he did have his settle time with his grandparents, and particularly the mama or the grandmother, he's sort of, that's when he settled down a bit.

Well, here's a couple of points that we can move on to here.

One of them is to remind people

at a moment where we're all obsessed with American growth.

Mario Draghi has just written a European Union report.

What can we learn from the

US?

All my friends who work in business and finance are pointing out that the European Union economy was the the same size as the US economy 10 years ago.

Now the US economy is 50% bigger.

That the US is a quarter of the world economy.

It's got the most productive, innovative firms in the world.

Its productivity is unbelievable.

And yes, it's got this going on.

I would argue much, much more of this type of extreme rural dysfunction and poverty than anything that we have in the United Kingdom.

And first...

Partly because of the scale.

Part scale.

Partly also there's not a proper welfare state.

There's not proper health provision.

And that leads me on to my second point, which is his mother is partly caught up in drugs and like many, many people in rural communities in the United States, caught up in opioids.

And this matters again, because what Trump's doing on tariffs, he's talking about fentanyl and fentanyl is one of these opioids.

So that's a story maybe we can get into it a little bit because this is maybe the most dramatic example.

There's a wonderful, wonderful book on this whole subject, which really brings these communities to light is, of course, this incredible book by Anne Case and the wonderful Scottish academic Angus Deaton.

And Deaths of Despair, this book really

looks at the way in which life expectancy is dropping in the most astonishing way, health indicators are dropping in a way that just doesn't make any sense in the modern world because of this incredible combination of unemployment, opioid crisis and hopelessness.

Both the criminal conspiracy by the manufacturers and the sellers of these opioids and

the doctors who work with them, but also the impact on these communities.

And it doesn't happen in Britain.

I mean, it's very interesting because that is to do with, and sometimes politics matters, and it really matters with things like an opioid crisis.

Legislation is different in Britain.

What doctors can do in different, what insurance does is different in Britain, while the NHS is different in Britain.

And all of that means that we don't have anything like this scale.

But I think part of the scale, so he comes from this part that's sort of known as Appalachia, which is sort of, you know, Georgia and Alabama and the South, right up as far as little bits of New York.

and a big part of the industrial success story of America down the years but then really badly hit by globalization and loads and loads of factories shutting down factories moving in then shutting down jobs going to China and the point he makes is that it became very very very difficult for working class people to find work and the only way you could really find work is to get a college degree and the education system wasn't working so i think you're right that the the american system did not lend itself to helping these people recover from these global shocks.

I mean, the scale of the drug stuff is just, you know, the way he writes about it,

he just takes it for granted that everybody's pretty much at it.

And by the way, by the end of it, she, I think, now is 10 years sober, but she was on heroin for quite a while.

The other thing that comes through, I'd love to know and to talk to him about his relationship with his understanding of addiction.

He obviously had to live with it, but my sense is that

he finds it.

He talks at some point about, you know, I've read all these garbage books about addiction.

And, you know, I think even there, he's got a little bit of, you know, it's a little bit of pull yourself together.

To hear the full episode, just go to the restlesspolitics.com.