The US vice president grew up in the poorest and roughest hills of the United States. He knows how to fight and hit hard. And that’s what he did in his meeting with Zelensky.
By Monica MAGGIONI
“You went to Pennsylvania in October to campaign for the opposition”: Pointing the finger at Zelensky, Vice President Vance launches the final attack on the Ukrainian president from the yellow couch in the Oval Office, in a masterfully constructed performance. The goal: to put Zelensky in a bad light, to ridicule him in the eyes of the American public, all to make peace with Putin, which instead is in fact a surrender of Ukraine, more reasonable and acceptable. Nothing in that scene in front of the cameras happened by chance. The violent argument was not an “accident” along the way. Trump watches grimly as his vice president orchestrates an attack on the Ukrainian president like never before in history within the walls of the Oval Office. The reporters are stunned.
It might seem like Vance was defending his President from Zelensky’s refusal to bow his head. But no! Vance wasn’t defending Trump. Vance was playing JD Vance at his purest. A tough, tough man who calculates every move.
Remember his silence in the hours immediately after Trump was sworn in? Some labeled him another shadowy, silent vice president, drawing bold comparisons to the faded, silent, and irrelevant Kamala Harris after Biden. Wrong! JD Vance is silent when he thinks it’s time to build the next movement. He doesn’t let you predict. He doesn’t reveal himself. JD knows how to fight, he knows how to throw punches, he knows how to fight like only a true Hillbilly can. He grew up in the poorest, roughest hills in the United States. Where white people live in scary treehouses, eat toxic, high-calorie foods, and live on meager government subsidies after the mines closed. And kids fight in the woods.
Vance spent his childhood in Ohio, spending winters near the steel mill where his father worked, watching his mother deteriorate with drugs and no future. Summers for him, a time of true relief and freedom in Jackson, Kentucky, at his grandmother’s house.
JD returns here often, he proudly tells the town. His family grave is a small patch of faded fake flowers and a torn, rusty barbed wire fence. He returned there eight years ago with Ron Howard, the great Hollywood director, when they were shooting the movie Hillbilly Elegy, based on his novel “An American Elegy.” He then bought a small farm. Hillbilly Elegy sold millions of copies, the movie was a hit, and he became famous. His face became famous. But his ascent had already begun. On a night of tragedy, faced with his mother’s successive descents into hell, he had chosen to leave and follow his own very difficult path to success.
He leaves. They accept him at Yale, then at big law firms. And then the meeting with Peter Thiel, the billionaire philosopher from Silicon Valley and founder of PayPal. Thiel works with secret services around the world thanks to his Palantir.
The German-born billionaire who never appears in public except when he gives long philosophical lectures, in which he talks about the humanity to come, his dream of a universe without government, dominated by freedom, and the apocalypse that awaits us. JD Vance and Peter Thiel work together, multiplying billions. JD also becomes rich, very rich. But they have power in mind. Politics. Although JD has already become the narrator of America’s poor whites left behind. The last on the social ladder. All those who vote for Trump. At first he is against Trump, then, with Thiel, they are convinced that Trump is the best key, the one ready, to come to power. The one who, with his being outside the schemes by nature, will allow them to build a new world without institutions, without rules, with only individuals building their future.
Because this is Vance’s paradox. When he thinks about his world, about the workers of Ohio, about the unfortunates of Kentucky, he doesn’t believe that the poor, the last, are the product of an unjust society. On the contrary, he thinks that they are those who don’t fight hard enough. Who don’t suffer to build the future. Who fall into the traps of a system that leads you to dream of what you can’t have, to go into debt to have more, and then collapse.
A corrupt system that, instead of training young people ready to fight, distracts them with speeches about “gender” that weaken society. On the other hand, he himself started there and succeeded. Others must therefore go through the same struggle as he did.
There is never any discussion of the possibilities in Vance’s story, which evolves and becomes increasingly uncompromising over the years, to the point where he continues to fantasize, along with Thiel, about a model of an elitist society. Hyper-meritocratic. With no place for welfare, inclusion, and building roads for those who have less. He imagines a world in which America is dominant and US engagement – including military engagement – is measured solely by the benefit to the United States itself. Economic and strategic benefit becomes the only means of evaluation. Three years ago, speaking with Steve Bannon himself on one of his “War Room” podcasts, during the days when he was running for senator from Ohio, he bluntly said: “I think it’s ridiculous that we continue to focus on the Ukrainian border, I don’t care what happens to Ukraine one way or the other.”
And what’s more, says Vance, “American aid to Ukraine is a way to finance a Europe that does nothing.”
He is harsh, incisive, brutally direct whenever he speaks his mind. European leaders had still not recovered from his speech about “a Europe that does not protect free speech” at the Munich conference two Sundays earlier. To a stunned audience he had forcefully declared: “In the UK and across Europe, I fear that freedom of speech is in retreat. You can’t force innovation or creativity, it seems, just as you can’t force people to think or feel or believe, and we believe that these things are certainly linked. And unfortunately, when I look at Europe today, it is sometimes not so clear what happened to some of the winners of the Cold War.”
He was referring to many things at once, the Romanian judiciary’s initiative to block the pro-Russian candidate, the policies for spreading hate speech and fake news on social media, but the main thing was the tone.
A harsh and defiant tone towards Europeans and their vision of the world. In recent days, older Europeans have been subjected to the same treatment by the new US vice president, like Zelensky. They are mocked for being stifled by rules and seen as an obstacle to the realization of a global project in which international institutions disappear, only economic considerations prevail and in which, an underlying elitism, in fact considers America “first” because it is the best. As in society, only the “best” should have space and power in Vance’s world. After all, this is his story. In Jackson, the elderly sitting at the tables of Arby’s on Main Street, eating five-dollar plates of bacon and eggs (the only protein they can have in a day) honor him as a hero.
He is the best because he made it and got out of that misery. Now he will explain to the world what the rules of the game are, because he is not afraid of anything. The hillbilly who survived his fate will not be a silent vice president. He is the man of a plan, of a disturbing design. He is part of a small but very powerful group of people who have divided the parts in comedy with a clear project in mind.
The journey has just begun.
