Trump is done if he doesn't win this election. He'll spend the rest of his
life in Federal lockup.

Kamala's going to hand over the White House keys to Walz on Day 1!

There�s an arresting scene in J.D. Vance�s moving 2016 memoir, Hillbilly
Elegy, in which Vance, a second-year student at Yale Law School, attends a
dinner hosted by the white-shoe law firm Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, in what
he describes as the most expensive restaurant in which he�s ever eaten.

Vance is stricken with social anxiety when asked whether he�d prefer the
Sauvignon Blanc or the Chardonnay, the sparkling water or the tap. After
sitting down to a place setting with nine bewildering utensils, he makes a
beeline for the men�s room to phone his girlfriend (and future wife), Usha,
for advice. �Go from outside to inside,� she explains, �and don�t use the
same utensil for separate dishes.�

Vance evoked powerfully the sense that his hardscrabble upbringing in
Ohio�s Rust Belt and Kentucky�s Appalachian hollows had left him without
the social capital necessary to move up in the world. But move up he did,
with the help of powerful mentors (Amy �Tiger Mom� Chua, David Frum) and an
adaptability that may have surprised even him.

Now Vance is proving a quick study yet again as he prepares to enter next
year�s primary to replace retiring Ohio Senator Rob Portman. He�s found
some new mentors�Tucker Carlson (who Vance insists is �the only powerful
figure who consistently challenges elite dogma�) and Sens. Josh Hawley and
Tom Cotton�and, with characteristic discipline, he�s remaking himself into
a Donald Trump Mini-Me. That�s a pretty neat trick for a guy who, in 2016,
sounded very convincing when he said, �I can�t stomach Trump. I think that
he�s noxious and is leading the white working class to a very dark place.�

Hillbilly Elegy, which cited liberals like Raj Chetty and William Julius
Wilson respectfully, was about promoting understanding between a deeply
alienated white working class and the book-buying cultural elite. But that
was the old Vance. The new Vance is about politics as total war. �We really
need to be really ruthless when it comes to the exercise of power,� Vance
said last week on The Federalist Radio Hour.

Conservatives, Vance said, �have lost every major powerful institution in
the country except for maybe churches and religious institutions, which of
course are weaker now than they have ever been. We have lost big business,
we have lost finance. We have lost the culture, we have lost the academy.�

An admiring reader of Hillbilly Elegy might interpret this as a prelude to
a lengthy consideration of where conservatives went astray. That admiring
reader would be wrong. �If we�re going to actually really effect real
change in the country,� Vance said, �it will require us completely
replacing the existing ruling class with another ruling class.� Unless we
overthrow them in some way, we�re gonna keep losing.� It wasn�t even clear
Vance was talking only about Democrats and liberals.

This is, of course, the Trump culture-war playbook. Vance carps on Twitter
about the phrases �woman of color,� �cisgender,� and �intersectional,� and
about critical race theory. None of this has any salience to the 2022
Senate election in Ohio. Vance decries college athletes who wear masks
(�totally insane�) and then, after an Ohio reporter tweets about it, calls
it �fake news.� Vance is even mimicking Trump�s weird use of capital
letters (the New York attorney general�s prosecution of the former
president, for instance, is �a threat to Our Democracy�).

At his most hypocritical, Vance, a millionaire banker who�s been affiliated
with at least three venture capital firms, is aligning himself with the
GOP�s war on woke capitalism. �Establishment Republican apologies for our
oligarchy,� Vance tweeted in April, �should always come with the following
disclaimer: �Big Tech pays my salary.� Never mind that Vance has worked for
tech moguls Steve Case and Peter Thiel, and that one month earlier, Thiel
put $10 million into a SuperPac supporting Vance�s yet-unannounced Senate
candidacy. (The Mercers have also reportedly contributed.)

A principal target for GOP opponents of woke capital, Vance suggests,
should be capital held by nonprofits like Harvard and the Ford Foundation
�that are destroying our country.� In a speech earlier this month before
the conservative Claremont Institute, Vance said, �All across the country
we have nonprofits, big foundations, that are effectively social justice
hedge funds.� They should be forced to pay tax and to pay down more of
their endowments, he said. Vance probably meant Yale, too, but mentioning
Old Eli would risk reminding people that in 2013 Yale handed him a Juris
Doctor.

Will working-class Ohio voters fall for this? They fell for Trump, twice,
and the 2022 primary is already shaping up into a competition for who can
show the greatest devotion to the Trump cult. If he wins the primary, Vance
may find some crossover appeal among people who remember the book fondly,
or the 2020 film adaptation (which, while no masterpiece, was better than
its terrible reviews). As late as April 9, Clarence Page of The Chicago
Tribune, an alumnus of the same Ohio high school as Vance, wrote that he
wished Vance well. Five years ago, I might have said the same. But Vance�s
latest transformation is more than I can stomach. He�s become an
Appalachian Sammy Glick.

Yak <NoBody@gmail.com> wrote in news:v9qjsr$1buap$7@solani.org:

> Trump is done if he doesn't win this election. He'll spend the rest
> of his life in Federal lockup.
>

Walz has no authority over Trump's NY State
trial and sentence, nor over any federal trial
or sentence. Nor has he claimed as much.
You are just lying.