The world discovered JD Vance on February 28, when, in the oval studio of the White House, in the middle of an altercation between Donald Trump and Volodymyr Zelensky, he showed an unexpected protagonist verve. The Vice -President of the United States has apostrophized the Ukrainian leader with an unprecedented hardness, while Trump, usually inclined to steal the scene, incentive in silence. An unprecedented fact. Never, in the era of the media, a vice -president had been seen to contact with tones so rough to his interlocutor, also under the eyes of the president.
The same tone that had used to the Monaco conference, ten days before, to apostrophize the European Union, accusing it of being antidemocratic for having hindered a sovereign movement – the Afd – which stinks of neonazism. In the United States Vance was already a strange character, especially thanks to his book Elegy American, a powerful autobiography that summarizes the epic of the “poor whites” and who in 2016 had conquered millions of readers (a good film from Ron Howard was also taken) and which constituted the trampoline for his political ascent, until he brought him, at just 40 years, on the Air Force Two, the Boeing available Americans. The juice of American elegia It is the ability that should be given to every American to rise and take flight despite the seriousness of his social condition. After all, it is the contemporary version of the sentence of John F. Kennedy pronounced in his inaugural speech, when he made an oath from the 35th president of the United States: «NOn ask what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country ».
Vance is Trump’s ideologist-a pragmatic without ideology, apart from the economic-financial perspective-and was the ace in the sleeve of “The Donald” to obtain and root the consents of the voters of the “Rust Belt”, the American manufacturing industrial belt devastated by the economic crisis. How did he conquer him? Simple: it’s one of them. Vance “Lo Spaccone” you have to imagine it without jacket and tie, with a hat as a warehouse worker or a worker helmet, in the deep America of the Appalachi region, in a landscape of decreed farmhouses, inhabited caravans, fast food, green hills that are set for autumn colors, stray dogs and abusive landfills. Where the inhabitants, called “Hillbilly” (Buzzurri) live according to a code of justice from Far West and the fights are an element of the landscape.
Its roots have in Jackson, Kentucky, but was born and raised in Middletown, Ohio, in the heart of the working class that once the backbone of the medium American class is constituted and which today lives on subsidies, disastrous and drugs, the main tank of the Republicans who voted for Trump. The childhood of JD (James David) Vance It seems written by Dickens and is a sample of inconvenience: a father who abandons him, an alcoholic mother, drug addicted and nevrasthenics, who at nine months filled him with Pepsi Cola’s bottle. Her home is crossed by many passage patrons, mom’s boyfriends. The grandmother (“the best thing that happened to me in life”) was her figure of reference, a loving lady and a little teddy who always brought a gun in the coat or under the seat of the car and who compliments him if at school he had faded for a noble cause. You will understand that with a similar background to enrich someone in public with bully – whether it is the president of the European Commission or the president of Ukraine in war for three years – it is natural to him. But in reality Vance’s attacks are never attacks of anger: “When he is angry, it’s because he wants it,” wrote the New Yorker periodical. Vance is a lucid and intelligent “Hillbilly” that has been able to redeem himself, post -modern reincarnation of the American dream, an example for all American “Buzzurri” like him: brilliant student, after graduating from Ohio University, was admitted to the University of Yale. He enlisted in the Marine and was in Iraq, married a woman of brilliant and cultured Indian origin like him, known to Yale, Usha Chilukuri, assistant of important judges in Washington, including the president of the Supreme Court John Roberts, who gave him three children. He also gradually climbed all the ranks of political power until he became the senator of Ohio, making himself known by Trump, who had made himself read by an assistant his book while playing golf in Mar-a-lago and ended up choosing him-among many aspiring-exactly 24 hours after the attack.
In 2019 he converted to Catholicism, stating that faith gave him a system of values to be a better husband and father. But his religiosity also has a strong political weight: Vance uses it to support his conservative ideas and attack progressive values, abounding with demagogy. In his speeches he cites Sant’Agostino and the decline of ancient Rome, leveraging on a nationalism that enhances America and persecutes and raises walls against the immigrant “brothers”.
In the United States, the weight of a vice -president always depends on what the president grants. Roosevelt ignored Truman, Carter gave ample powers to Mondale. Trump seems to follow this second attitude and we already talk about his deputy as the next President of the United States. This poverty is functional for “The Donald” that becomes anger, I hate for traditional politicians and immigrants and is transformed into consent and conservatism near the working class, combative against progressive and Woke values, isolationist in foreign policy, nationalist on immigration (despite being an immigrant son of immigrants). A poverty that the Democrats, with whom he sympathized in the past (he had also derided Trump), were unable to intercept. The “braggart” has been able to lend to the current president that baggage of ideas from that distant region of the appalachi who ended up infecting America. And that now America wants to impose in the world.
