It already took some Olympian logic-gymnastics to accept real-estate-mogul-turned-game-show-host Donald Trump as the populist voice of Real America. So, it might only take a tiny backward handspring further to applaud Trump’s choice for co-defender of the working class: a guy with an executive producer credit on a Netflix movie based on his own life.

“Sometimes I view members of the elite with an almost primal scorn,” JD Vance wrote in his bestselling memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, the source material for the 2020 Netflix film. Published in 2016, the book was once viewed as a literary decoder-ring for how Rust Belt residents think. But it’s unclear how anyone could still consider Vance a coalmine whisperer now that he’s spent the years since 2016 further transforming himself into a pillar of the galactically wealthy elite. While the primary narrative of his VP nomination is Vance’s transition from Never Trumper to Trump’s running mate, what’s even more striking is the clash between his working-class savior façade and the Silicon Valley reality.

“He’s going to appeal to all these lunch-bucket Democrats,” Republican Senator Steve Daines confidently said of Vance on Monday at the Republican National Convention.

This prediction may not hold water. It remains unclear at this point, neck-deep in the 2024 election, exactly which lunch-bucket Democrats tend to have a soft spot for venture capitalists with extensive ties to tech billionaires Peter Thiel and Marc Andreesen.

After growing up shuffling between rural Kentucky and suburban Ohio, as described in his book, Vance eventually got accepted into Yale Law School. Upon graduating in 2013, he promptly began working as a principal in Mithril Capital, the Silicon Valley VC firm founded by Thiel. Years later, after Hillbilly Elegy cemented his national profile, Vance joined DC-based investment firm Revolution LLC, purportedly to focus on investing in startups located in the Midwest. He later cofounded another VC firm, Narya Capital, for much the same reasons. This one was even headquartered in Cincinnati.

On the surface, it all sounds like a feel-good story about a son of the Midwest taking what he learned from Silicon Valley and applying it back home. Robin Hood for the Rust Belt. Considering that Vance first made his political ambitions known in 2018, however, and that he has glided along on a ridiculously charmed trajectory ever since, to a Senate seat in 2022 and potentially the White House this November, the story smacks of cold hard calculation. And besides, Vance may have already maxed out on wringing questionably polished feel-good stories out of his life with Netflix’s take on Hillbilly Elegy.

Ron Howard, the filmmaking equivalent of Tom Hanks’s EveryDad screen persona, did his level best to broaden the appeal of Vance’s bestseller for Netflix’s global audience. It opens with a scene of Howard’s own creation, in which Appalachian adolescent Vance saves an injured turtle’s life—and reveals that words like “carapace” are already in his vocabulary—against the urging of a less-enlightened friend to instead see how far he can toss the turtle. This is how we know that Vance was, even from an early age, destined to avoid becoming one of the shirtless men standing in decrepit driveways with immobile pickup trucks whom Howard surveys during the opening credits.

The more telling change, however, is how the Netflix version of Vance’s life conveys his distaste for elites. It leaves out the most explicit conservative elements of his book—his hatred for welfare, a strained defense of predatory lending, chalking up the downward mobility of rural Kentuckians to “learned helplessness”—and instead presents upper-crusty East-Coasters looking down on Vance’s noble Midwesterner. When a law-school-attending Vance goes out for Fancy Dinner with a white-shoe law firm, one of the partners can’t wrap his head around a Yale student being from a flyover state. “It must feel like you’re from another planet,” he snickers, about the idea of Vance returning back home for a visit.

When the film was savaged by critics, it only seemed to further confirm Vance’s vision of a world in which monocle-wearing masters of the universe wage war against bootstrapped strivers such as himself. According to at least one friend, the film’s withering reception in late-2020 was “the last straw.” When Vance began his senatorial campaign in Ohio the following year, he did so as a full-throated MAGA-monger. He apologized for previous negative comments about Trump—which include referring to him as “America’s Hitler”—advocated building The Wall, and claimed mass voter fraud by Dems in the 2020 election. 

He also ramped up his rhetoric about elites around this time. In a 2021 interview, he called Silicon Valley companies “enemies of Western Civilization,” despite having teamed up with Thiel, Andreessen, and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt to found Narya Capital just two years earlier. He also started referring to universities, such as the one he went to, as “the enemy,” further burnishing his populist credentials. But for an anti-elitist crusader of the working class, Vance was sure comfortable taking lots of money from a Super PAC that Thiel helped fund.

If Vance were truly the threat to Silicon Valley’s “enemies of Western Civilization” that he portrays himself as, though, why do tech billionaires like David Sacks and Bill Ackman support his candidacy for vice president? Why was World’s Richest Man Elon Musk reportedly lobbying Trump behind the scenes to pick Vance? And perhaps most importantly, what will Vance owe all these technocrats in return for their support?

Perhaps it will be helping deliver his high-profile investors the corporation-friendly, deregulation-heavy second Trump term of their dreams. Despite recently commending Federal Trade Commission chair Lina Khan (a move that suggests a more Biden-like approach to antitrust regulations), Vance’s other public comments suggest an approach that, though couched within a supposed war on elites, ultimately benefits the wealthy. 

In a 2021 appearance on the Jack Murphy Live podcast, Vance described how he would “rip out America’s leadership class.”

“I think Trump is going to run again in 2024,” he said. “I think that what Trump should do, if I was giving him one piece of advice: Fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people.”

Anyone paying close attention to the news might notice that this proposal sounds an awful lot like Project 2025, the 922-page plan to vastly expand presidential power in a second Trump term, fire up to 50,000 government workers, and replace them with die-hard MAGA loyalists. Crucially, one of the Project 2025 plans involves shifting taxes from the wealthy to the middle class. 

One of the elements of Hillbilly Elegy director Ron Howard wisely left out of the film was Vance’s distaste for “corporate handouts.” Now, Netflix viewers may never understand the hypocrisy of Vance modeling the political version of himself after a president whose signature achievement in office was a tax bill that disproportionately benefited billionaires. 

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