As The Nation's Joan Walsh wrote in June, Vance became the supposed bard of the white working class after he wrote his memoir Hillbilly Elegy. The New York Times promoted it as "a tough love analysis of the poor who back Trump."
Meanwhile, PBS noted that after Trump's near-death experience at the weekend, the role of Vance is now much more significant.
Here are five things that Americans should know about Vance:
1. Onlookers have claimed Vance's morals have collapsed
According to retired professor Tom Nichols, who describes himself as a Never Trump conservative, Vance is a "contemptible and cringe-inducing clown."
Writing for The Nation in July 2021, Nichols said that the lawmaker has turned "on everything he once claimed to believe." He's a "sellout” or “backstabber." A “traitor” or “apostate.”
"Worse, Vance has not only repudiated his earlier views on Trump, but has done so with ruthless cynicism, embracing the former president and his madness while winking at the media with a What can you do? shrug about the stupidity of Ohio’s voters," said Nichols.
“If I actually care about these people and the things I say I care about,” Nichols quoted Vance telling Time Magazine, “I need to just suck it up and support him.”
Former U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara called Vance a “pathetic loser poser fake jerk."
Cleveland News Scene said of Vance: "If politics is the art of empty gestures, J.D. was proving himself a prodigy."
2. Vance has been accused of lying about being a "working class hero."
New York Magazine reporter Sarah Jones wrote in March that Vance pretends he's fighting for working-class people but that the reality is he's trying to "reshape the Republican Party, and America too, in part by appealing to working-class voters."
She was responding to a Politico profile heralding that Vance was "something like an intellectual, or at least like a completely unselfconscious nerd."
The reality is, she wrote, he's become a "figurehead for the New Right," attacking anti-Trump conservatives and the left to ensure the "upper echelons of American government, business, media, entertainment and academia" are all "populated" by conservatives.
Vance isn't fighting for working-class people, she argued. His voting record in the Senate shows he opposes union organizing while marching on picket lines with the UAW.
Historian Gabriel Winant wrote Vance’s “false class politics” puts “the suffering of working-class people” in “conspiratorial rather than structural terms.”
"Vance isn’t stupid," Jones said. "And he knows that he can stitch anything onto a critique that is divorced from reality. He can peddle racism in anti-immigration ads and justify himself by his mother’s addiction... He can insist that he is still that working-class whisperer. But the truth is far uglier. The working class has many enemies in Washington, and Vance is one of them. He is selling out America’s workers to his friends and allies on the right — and they have no interest in sharing power or wealth with the masses. The New Right seeks power for itself and itself alone. In Vance’s America, workers will stay on the bottom rung."
3. Trump has complete control over Vance, critics have said.
Unlike former Vice President Mike Pence, Vance's career in Republican politics is tied to Trump. While Vance's successful book may have catapulted him to success, it is his association with Trump and MAGA that has put him in a position of power, experts have said.
As the Cleveland News Scene recalled, Trump "is a cruel master. He demanded servility from his yes-men, then belittled them for their weakness in doing so. He couldn’t resist mocking J.D. for the toady he’d become."
“J.D. is kissing my a-s he wants my support so bad,” Trump told a rally crowd in Ohio. It was a humiliation for Vance, said the Toledo Blade.
Still, the Cleveland report called Trump the "impresario of fraud," who was doing nothing more than "mocking a lesser practitioner."
4. He's been criticized as being little more than a right-wing troll
The Guardian's Jan-Werner Müller wrote, "Vance has perfected what, on the right, tends to substitute for policy ideas these days: trolling the liberals," Müller wrote. "Mobilizing voters is less about programs, let alone a real legislative record (Vance has none; his initiatives like making English the official language of the US are just virtue signaling for conservative culture warriors). Rather, it’s to generate political energy by deepening people’s sense of shared victimhood."
MSNBC opinion columnist Hayes Brown highlighted another way that Vance was able to deploy his trolling beyond social media to the halls of the U.S. Senate.
In a letter to the Justice Department, Brown said that right-wing trolls are always known for asking questions they claim they're "just asking."
"Ones who pretend they aren’t necessarily arguing for any specific point of view or outcome but are just bravely bringing thorny subjects up," Brown said.
