A new piece in The Atlantic laid out how Vice President JD Vance made a deliberate decision to "betray his true values" rooted in Appalachia in order to go full MAGA alongside Donald Trump when the political timing was right.
Journalist George Packer examined Vance's rise from the working class in a de-industrialized Ohio town to the hallowed halls of Yale Law School, writing that Vance was "tasked with explaining the world he came from to the world he recently joined."
Packer argued that Vance's unique understanding of both worlds plus his "gifts of intellect and rhetoric" could have been used to bring "the country’s conflicting strands together."
"Instead," Packer wrote, Vance "took a path of extreme divisiveness to the peak of power, becoming a hard-line convert to the Catholic Church, post-liberal populism, and the scorched-earth cause of Donald Trump."
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Packer wrote that Vance, who wrote the bestselling memoir Hillbilly Elegy, was once earnest and sensitive — a far cry from "the powerful politician who sneers at 'childless cat ladies,' peddles lies about pet-eating Haitian immigrants, sticks a finger in the face of the besieged president of Ukraine, and gets into profane fights with random critics on X."
Packer also accused Vance of using the community he came from to continue to justify his MAGA beliefs.
"He justifies every cruel policy, blatant falsehood, and constitutional breach by aligning himself with the unfairly treated people he grew up with, whether or not his administration is doing them any actual good," Packer wrote. "His idea of American identity has gone hard and narrow—not the encompassing creed of the founding documents, but the Appalachian dirt of the graveyard where his ancestors lie buried."
Packer wrote that Vance's "story" could wind up one of two ways: "In one account, a poor boy from the provinces makes good in the metropole, turns against his glittering benefactors, and goes home to fight for his people. In the other, the poor boy seizes every opportunity on his way up, loses his moral compass, and is ruined by his own ambition."