Can JD Vance Survive Donald Trump? (Part 1)

0:00Thank you. J.D. Vance, Trump's heir or Trump's victim? I'm Anthony Scaramucci.

0:36Anthony Scaramucci:And I'm Katty Kay. So just a few years ago, J.D. Vance was one of Trump's fiercest Republican critics. Today, he's become, though, one of his most loyal defenders. And honestly, it's one of the most extraordinary political transformations in modern American politics. Over the next four episodes, we'll go through Vance's journey from a chaotic childhood in Appalachia to Yale Law School to Silicon Valley, Peter Thiel's Inner Circle and his bestselling memoir that made him famous and finally brought him into Donald Trump's orbit. But it just isn't a story about one politician. It's about power, loyalty, reinvention.

1:18And what happens? What happens when ambition collides with one of the most unpredictable figures in modern politics? By the end of this series, we'll try to answer one question. Is J.D. Vance the natural heir to MAGA? or is he simply the latest politician to believe, excuse me, Mike Pence, that he can survive Donald Trump before that woodchipper motor starts, Caddy? That's the big question. Let's get going here.

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2:53Anthony Scaramucci:So let's take us back because I think JD Vance's history and where he comes from is super important. I've just been rereading his memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, and you can see so many echoes of Vance today and his political beliefs and his conservatism, his version of conservatism in his childhood. He was actually born James Donald Bowman in Middleton, Ohio, in the Midwest. Appalachia is this long mountainous region that stretches from the deep south to the fringes of the industrial Midwest and Northeast. It takes in states like Ohio and Kentucky and West Virginia, right down into Tennessee. Middleton is a town of people who had been dependent, like many people in Appalachia, on blue collar jobs, like in much of the Rust Belt.

3:45Anthony Scaramucci:But those jobs, by the time JD comes along, they are gone. It's largely a white population, and it includes some of the poorest areas in the whole of the United States. So that's the background to the area he grew up in. Tell us a little bit about his family unit. Well, I mean, the thing to understand, I just want to set the scene for everybody. Some people call this Appalachia, then they don't know it. If they call it Appalachia, then they're from the area, right? And so I used to be involved with a college down there called Berea College. And what is Berea College? It's in Berea, Kentucky. And what do they do?

4:24They give free tuition and they take people out of these coal mining shacks, Caddy. I mean, this is the 2020s. They're living without hot water in the house. They have a propane tank outside the house and they're heating the water. They're bringing it into a basin to get themselves washed. They have a outhouse, which is basically a hole in the ground where they will use that as their place to go to the bathroom. And I just want to set the scene for you.

4:53Katty Kay:The people are very, very poor. And when you're in a poor situation like that, psychologically, it can lead to lots of desperation, which leads to pain relief, mental pain relief, Caddy. That could be alcoholism. It could be opioid addiction. It could be just the struggles to move day to day. And so J.D. Vance was born to a mom who struggled with alcohol addiction and opioids. OK, he was also in an abusive situation. The mother was abusive. He writes about it in Hillbilly Elegy. What made him a darling, and Cady, correct me if I'm wrong, before J.D. Vance arrived on the political scene, was he a darling of the left?

5:42Yes or no?

5:42Anthony Scaramucci:That book, Hillbilly Elegy, with its descriptions as you've just kind of laid it out of life in Appalachia and what it had been like for America's largely white working class over the last 30 years, made JD a sort of translator of America's white working class to liberals who, after the 2016 election, realized that they had missed something big in America. This was a whole area of the country they just didn't understand. And when he released Hillbilly Elegy, they looked to him as somebody who could explain that world to them because he was brought up not just geographically in it, but his family unit was typical of many families, as he writes in the book, in Appalachia.

6:33Anthony Scaramucci:So although he was born Bowman, he has the name Vance. Why does he have the name Vance? Because his father gave him up for adoption when he was a child to one of the many stepfathers. He talks about this revolving door of men who came through his life after his parents divorced. And at one point, his father gives him up for adoption. J.D. says it was the worst day of his life. He bursts into tears. He's absolutely devastated by this. Later on, his father will tell him, I wanted to keep you, but your mother said it would ruin you and you needed to grow up with your stepfather of the time. And so he takes his stepfather's name for a little bit.

7:10Anthony Scaramucci:And in the end, he ends up with the name of his grandparents, his mother's mother and father's name, which is Vance. And they turn out really to be the kind of most important people in his life. I mean, it's extraordinary. Just going back through the book, I had forgotten how well he writes, Anthony, and how well he writes about this family unit that he grows up in. I mean, he tells the story of his mother at one point who's about to lose her nursing job because she's back on opioids and weed again. And so she asks young JD, who is a child in school, to give her a clean urine sample. because without a clean urine sample, she's going to lose her job because she's suddenly being drug tested and she has till tomorrow to come up with that urine sample.

8:01Anthony Scaramucci:His neighbor who falls asleep because she's on drugs and the bath overflows and so the police and everything in her house is ruined. It's the famous story of his grandmother, Mormor, who's the most important person in his life really, who sets fire to her husband because he comes home drunk again. I mean, his mother in the car journey who is turning around and literally beating the kids up on this car journey for no real reason because the tension has got so hard. She's threatening to crash the car. He ends up fleeing to his neighbor's house, Caddy.

8:36Katty Kay:He then has to lie to the investigators to protect her. Okay. And so he's 12 years old. You got to think of the pain going on here now. Think about how young and think about the adulting and you have to parentify now to protect your parent. But I want to read this to you because I took it from the book. At 12 years old, I learned the family survival skill. Protect the powerful, unstable figure at the center of your life, no matter what they did to you. Okay, that is what he's doing now for Donald Trump. Okay, he will lie and shapeshift himself, but he learned how to do this at this super young, fragile age.

9:24Anthony Scaramucci:There's so much shapeshifting in his childhood, and it is a survival technique. You're right, Anthony. And he's deploying it today, you know, at the highest levels of the U.S. government, the highest levels of global government. That shape shift that you see as a result of that car incident is in full glory today, Kat. I want to go back for a second because most politicians flip-flop on issues.

9:56Katty Kay:J.D. Vance flip-flopped on his birth certificate, his name, and his personality. But this is a story that is real. And this is a story that's an addendum to what's the matter with Kansas. Do you remember Thomas Frank's book, What's the Matter with Kansas? Yeah. And so just quickly for our viewers, 2005, Thomas Frank came out and said, why are these conservatives in Kansas that live in the Bible Belt voting against their own interests? And this was really the germination of what became MAGA, because you've heard me say on the show, Caddy, that these are social conservatives that are fiscally liberal.

10:40Katty Kay:They want the government programs, but they want to adhere to some rigid orthodoxy in the Bible. And Vance is living in this world. And so Thomas Franks, in 2005, writes about this world. and then 11 short years later, we get a young man born in 1984 that actually lives in this world, and he's telling you about the struggle going on in the world. And Bonnie, I mean, I love this woman, okay? Meemaw, Bonnie Blayton Vance. I mean, how could you not like this person? She's getting married, we think 13 or 14. When she dies, there are 19 loaded handguns stashed around the house. I mean, come on. OK.

11:24Katty Kay:And so this is somebody who, to me, J.D. Vance looks at and he's like, OK, there's something wrong with every one of these people. I don't want to be these people. And he's changing names. He's trying to find his identity. So this is a high IQ person who's got a strong ambition caddy from day one. and he's looking around and saying, wow, how did I get born into this situation? But, Caddy, I don't think Vance's childhood is really that unique given the area that he grew up in. So, tell us about that area. Tell us about what happened economically to that area.

12:06Anthony Scaramucci:So, he spends time between Ohio, where his mormor and his mother are living, and Kentucky, where his biological father are living. And the Kentucky setup just seems to be a little bit more calm. It's more religion in the family. His father has converted and goes to church every week. And so that's a little bit of a relief for him. But overall, in both places that he grows up in Jackson and in Middleton, it's super poor. Half of the town's children in Jackson, Kentucky, are living in poverty. The white working class in both of those areas are struggling. Social mobility is really down. The economic prospects are pretty minimal.

12:52Anthony Scaramucci:Divorce and poverty rates are high by national standards. And as we mentioned, drug addiction in Appalachia is a real problem. There have been so many good books that have been written on how that area of America became kind of ground zero for the opioid crisis. But a lot of it came out of you had people who worked in the coal mines. They got injuries from working in the coal mines. This was dirty, difficult work. A lot of people got injuries. They were given these prescription medications and then you had these pill mills that set up and the opioid crisis exploded in poor Appalachia. It accounts for something like at this point 30 % of the US population, but nearly 50 % of the deaths from opioid are actually taking place in Appalachia.

13:45Anthony Scaramucci:I think that is also key to understanding Vance because as you read Hillbilly Elegy again, it is this amazing portrait, but there's also a clear political voice that emerges from it. And I've known people from this region who have said to me, they don't like the book because they feel JD kind of lacked empathy for the people he's writing about, that he's writing about this One person I knew from very close to where JD grew up said, he wrote about our problems, he got rich off our problems, but he did nothing to help us. And when you read back over the book, you see some of that. And he's very angry about the opioid crisis, understandably.

14:29Anthony Scaramucci:He's angry about his mother for her addiction. He's angry about this neighbor and he's kind of pretty dismissive of his neighbor for the way she throws away her life because of this opioid crisis. But it really is, it's a regional issue. And it started, I think, Antony, in the process of deindustrialization and moving away from the coal mines, which have been such a huge source of income right in that area. And he talks about this in the book. And this is something that Trump is jumping on in 2016.

15:00Katty Kay:And it helps to write Trump into the presidency. But before I get there, I just want to ask you this question. Do you think there's some self-hatred in the book? Or do you think there's some self-hatred about his family or hatred about his economic environment? Is that what you think? That's such a good question.

15:18Anthony Scaramucci:I think there is some anger towards the class he grew up in about this woman, Patty, who passes out in the bath that had overflowed because of drugs. He writes, this is the reality of our community. It's about a naked druggie destroying what little value exists in her life. On the same kind of story, he then goes on to say, we talk about the value of hard work, but tell ourselves that the reason we're not working is some perceived unfairness. Obama shut the coal mines. The Chinese took our jobs. Our homes are a chaotic mess. We scream and yell at each other. It is a good question, Anthony, because it struck me reading it again when it hadn't when the book came out the first time.

16:04Anthony Scaramucci:I didn't really read it like that. But he is harsh about the people he grew up with. And he's kind of saying that was their choice and that was their responsibility. You can hear the libertarian voice in him. You can hear the conservative voice in him that is saying they needed to fix those problems themselves. They chose that chaos and throwing away what little value exists of her life. I mean, that's a very scathing comment on his neighbor. It's interesting because I feel like I have a revised thought because of his political life. So I'm going to go back to me reading that book in 2016. And I didn't see the self-hatred there.

16:53I see the self-hatred now because of the way his career manifested.

16:57Katty Kay:But if you just read the book, here is an author by the name of J.D. Vance. He went into the Marine Corps. He tried to build himself up, ended up at Yale. I read the book as a rite of passage book, but also talking about this deep, you know, And if you talk about a K-shaped economy, Caddy, Appalachia is at the bottom point of the downward strike of the K, right? You can't get any worse than Appalachia. And so for me, I saw it that way in the beginning. But I do see it the way you're suggesting your friend sees it today because of the ways life unfolded. I just want to point out to people that this is a rich, resourced area.

17:36Katty Kay:There's coal, there's lumber, metal, high-nutrient soil for farming. But it was stripped a few times. Okay, in the 1870s, people came in there and took advantage of the area. They plundered the area. They did it again right after the Gilded Age. And then, of course, there was massive deindustrialization of the United States from, let's say, 1990, Caddy, to 2010. That 20-year period of time started hollowing out these places. And so now, you know, there's no boom-bust cycle. There's just job opportunities going down in a descending line. And that de-industrialization has happened all over the country.

18:22Katty Kay:Trump saw that. Vance obviously talked about it. And remember, the country, whether we like it or not, the companies were focused on profits and less about taking care of people. And the result, Caddy, is a dismal result. It's job losses, it's poverty, it's economic decline for the region. And there's something in the book that I just want to bring up for people, and it's called Middle Tucky. Do you remember that line in the book? And so what is Middle Tucky? The Middle Tucky is parts of Ohio that are adjacent to Kentucky where they call it Middle Tucky because you've actually imported poverty.

19:04Katty Kay:and you imported some of the values and the culture of the Appalachian region. It sort of spilled over into Ohio. And in Pennsylvania, because my family's from Pennsylvania, the right side of the state is like Washington, D.C. and New York. The left side of the state is like Ohio. But the middle of that state, you know what we used to call that? Pencil effing tucky, Caddy K. Pencil effing tucky. Why do we call it that? because it was like Kentucky. It was barren. And so when these guys go off on Vance and say that he plundered them and so on and so forth, I get all that, but I do believe Vance.

19:46Katty Kay:I do believe that he lived this way. I do believe that he had this level of this, there's authenticity to these stories.

19:54Anthony Scaramucci:I completely believe it. And when you read these stories, they're so graphic and so well memorized. I think that was his reality. So let's zoom out then from his world and growing up there to what that meant for the politics of the region, because in a way, the politics reflects both the economy and the culture. This is a working class area where people are very dependent on welfare, where the economy had been thriving, but with kind of industries that have gone. And so now people are struggling. And I think that explains some of the politics of that region. And since the 1960s, of course, both Ohio and Kentucky have been bellwethers until Donald Trump came along and made them firmly Republican.

20:38Anthony Scaramucci:Ohio voted the way of the national election every time from 1964. In fact, until 2020, when it voted for Trump over Biden, Kentucky went the way of the winner in every election from 1964 until Barack Obama's election in 2008, when it voted Republican and it's voted Republican ever since. But you can see that during that period when it was more economically prosperous, when it had the industrialization, both of these states swung the way of the country. And it's partly driven, I think, by this white working class that's becoming increasingly Republican and Trumpist that you've now seen them become solidly in the red column.

21:22Anthony Scaramucci:So that is the world that J.D. Vance grew up in. We're going to take a quick break. Join us afterwards. And we're going to talk about how Vance manages to pull himself out of this chaotic upbringing.

21:41And we're back from the break. And so, this is the world that Vance is growing up in. And what's incredible, Caddy. He's born in 1984. And I'm not going to date

21:52Katty Kay:Caddy Kay, so I'm just going to speak for myself. I was a junior in college in 1984. Just to give you a sense of how young I think Vance is. But I just want to go back to 11, which is 1995 for Vance. He's 11. His father comes back into his life. And he says that they had a pretty decent relationship and they saw each other regularly. And then when he's 13, his grandfather died. And this sent the family into a downward spiral because he was sort of a psychological anchor. And then the mother's full-on prescription drug addiction goes out of control. And so that's the point, Caddy, where he does move in with his grandmother for a bit.

22:37Katty Kay:And he's going back and forth. He seesawing, ping-ponging between the mom and the dad. And then his mom is going from partner to partner. And that's when his personality has to make all these adaptations. He's the good brother to his step, either they're not married, but the children of the boyfriend. He likes cars in one incident. He likes cops in another incident. He's not doing great in school, but he's very, very smart. And guess what he does? What every kid does, he starts to smoke and drink weed. So put it together for me, Katya. You're a mom. Put it together for me. imagine this struggle 11, 12, 13, 14.

23:19Katty Kay:You're getting seesawed around and you're living in this very poor, desperate environment.