Netflix’s ‘Hillbilly Elegy’ showed us years ago that JD Vance is full of contradictions

The movie, and the book on which it’s based, lean heavily into Vance’s image as a salt-of-the-earth son of the Rust Belt. But in reality, Trump’s new VP is best thought of as a vessel for the elite.

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.