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now from the Institute of Politics at

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the University of Chicago in CNN Audio,

0:49

the Ax Files with

0:51

your host, David Axelrod. Even

0:55

years ago, I did an Ax Files

0:57

podcast with JD Vance when he

1:00

was the young author of a bestselling memoir. The

1:02

book Hill Billie Elegy describes the struggles

1:05

of the white working class in his

1:07

own troubled family in rural Ohio. At

1:10

the time we spoke, months after Donald

1:12

Trump's election as president, Vance

1:14

was in the middle of a transition

1:17

from vehement Trump critic to

1:19

describing himself as Trump curious.

1:22

Well, now that transition is fully

1:24

complete. This week, Trump chose now

1:27

Senator JD Vance, just 39 years

1:30

old, as his running mate for vice president.

1:33

So I thought it would be fun and

1:35

useful to revisit the conversation we had back

1:37

then and compare it to who he

1:39

is today. Here's that conversation.

1:46

JD Vance, welcome. You

1:48

know, they say everything in

1:50

life is timing. So

1:53

you wrote a book, a memoir of

1:56

your life growing up in and

1:59

around Appalachia. And

2:03

it was an incredible journey. Now, every

2:06

elite in the country looks

2:08

at you as sort of Margaret Mead

2:10

or their Sherpa to lead them through

2:12

this world that they don't understand, that

2:15

Donald Trump obviously did. And

2:17

we'll talk about him and all of

2:20

that. But the book itself, apart from

2:22

the timing, is a beautiful book, and

2:24

it's an incredible story. And

2:28

so I want to start there

2:30

and just ask you a little bit

2:32

about how

2:34

you grew up and how you

2:37

got from there to here as

2:39

a Yale-educated lawyer and now

2:41

Sherpa for the elites. Sure. Well,

2:44

the story in my mind really

2:46

starts in Eastern Kentucky, the 1940s,

2:48

when my grandparents get married and

2:50

move to the north of Rust

2:53

Belt, Ohio, what we now call the Rust Belt,

2:55

then was the land of opportunity. And

2:57

they just wanted a better life for themselves. They were

2:59

very poor in Eastern Kentucky, and so they were able

3:01

to raise a family on a single wage. In

3:04

Ohio. In Ohio. Things

3:06

were pretty chaotic. I mean, they definitely brought with them a

3:09

lot of the habits they had acquired from being

3:11

incredibly poor growing up in the mountains. And so

3:13

they didn't fit in quite as well. Their family

3:15

life was pretty chaotic. What were those habits? Well,

3:18

they grew up in

3:21

just... They

3:24

were used to struggle and they were

3:26

used to not necessarily living

3:29

their life in a way that was

3:31

surrounded by material comfort. And so they

3:33

didn't necessarily know how to adjust that

3:35

well to having money. They didn't fit

3:37

in especially well in their communities. And

3:39

their family life was pretty chaotic and

3:41

pretty traumatic. I mean, even back

3:43

in the 30s and 40s when things

3:45

went pretty well for them and their family, still

3:47

there was a lot of violence, a lot of

3:49

alcoholism. My grandma's grandfather

3:52

had famously killed a

3:54

local political rival in the county.

3:57

And so there was just a fair amount of, I

3:59

think, amount of... emotional baggage that they brought with them

4:01

and just the fact that they were a 16 and

4:03

a 13 year old who had moved north to

4:05

escape their family because their family wasn't too happy

4:08

about the fact that my grandma was pregnant. At

4:10

13. At 13 and

4:12

she had the baby at 14, it didn't survive,

4:14

but goes to show how different of a time

4:16

it was. And

4:19

what happened in Ohio? How

4:21

did that unravel? Well,

4:25

it unraveled slowly. So they had three

4:27

kids and the first kid I think

4:29

was raised in a relatively stable environment.

4:32

Things were still pretty chaotic, but he

4:34

looks back on it pretty fondly. But

4:37

by the time their two younger kids came

4:39

along, things were really rough. My grandfather was

4:41

drinking a lot. My grandmother really wasn't able

4:43

to take care of the home in the

4:46

way that she was used to. And

4:48

so my mom and my aunt really grew up

4:50

in a very chaotic, very traumatic home. And

4:53

the lesson in some ways of that life,

4:55

I think, is that you don't necessarily forget

4:57

everything that you learned when you were growing

4:59

up just because you maybe have a little

5:01

bit of material comfort. And

5:03

so what happened is at the same time

5:06

that my mom and my aunt were starting

5:08

to go through adulthood and just like my

5:10

grandparents had not forgotten every lesson of the

5:12

way they grew up, the industrial economy in

5:14

Ohio really started to go south and jobs

5:16

started to become harder to come by. So

5:19

you sort of layer all of these emotional

5:21

and cultural issues onto an economy that wasn't

5:23

really working and you had a pretty combustible

5:25

mixture. What was your grandfather doing? Well

5:28

he was working at a steel mill, Armco

5:30

Steel, which is still in operation though it employs

5:32

many, many fewer people than it used to.

5:35

But he was a welder and spent his entire

5:37

career there. He retired there. He had stock in

5:39

Armco when he retired and was really

5:42

proud of it. But he was one

5:44

of the few, he was, by the time that

5:46

he retired it was already clear that

5:48

the kids who were coming out of high

5:50

school weren't going to be able to rely

5:52

on that sort of wage stability. And just

5:54

out of curiosity, because I know you're a

5:56

student of these things, where did those jobs

5:58

go? Did they go? is

12:01

that relationship between you and your mom

12:03

and your mom who you

12:05

say people sort of learn, I don't want

12:07

to use the word pathologies because it's demeaning

12:11

or it's taken as demeaning, but they

12:13

learn from what they know. And

12:17

so your mom repeated

12:19

some of the patterns that she saw and

12:23

things kind of spun out of control. Yeah,

12:26

that's exactly right. You know, she

12:28

had my sister when she was 18, she had me when

12:30

she was 23, she

12:33

was a really smart person but actually

12:35

had to graduate from high school earlier.

12:37

Salutatorian of her high school class. I

12:39

mean, yeah, I had to graduate from

12:41

high school early actually because my sister

12:43

was coming. And

12:47

it's really striking in

12:49

some ways that so many of the

12:51

things that mom most presented about her

12:53

childhood just ended up replaying in the

12:55

childhood that me and Lindsey had. And

12:58

it speaks to something that

13:00

I think is one of the real motivators for me to

13:03

write the book, which is that it's

13:05

not easy to flip off all of the

13:07

switches that were turned on when you were

13:09

a kid, right? These things that we see,

13:11

it's very intuitive. The things that

13:13

we see, the attitudes that we see, the

13:15

habits that we develop, they necessarily leave an

13:18

impact. And that doesn't mean that

13:21

they're a sort of death sentence, that you

13:23

can't ever escape them, but you have to,

13:25

I think, appreciate the fact that when kids

13:27

grow up a certain way, it necessarily leaves

13:29

its trace on how they approach

13:31

their own adult life, how they approach their own

13:33

families and their own children. You know, I wrote

13:35

a book, a memoir myself.

13:37

And the thing that I

13:39

discovered in writing it was

13:42

that it was an exercise in discovery that I

13:44

learned a lot about myself. I learned a lot

13:46

about my family. I learned a lot about the

13:48

things that influenced my life that

13:50

I just hadn't thought about as

13:53

deeply before that.

13:55

And clearly, this is

13:57

the case with you.

14:00

You had some real

14:03

anger toward your mom, and

14:05

she was negligent in some

14:07

ways when

14:12

she was going through difficult times.

14:14

Where did you come to learn about

14:16

her, and

14:19

how we know now, she

14:21

had a drug problem. She was a nurse. She

14:24

had a drug problem that she fought off

14:27

and on. Sure. How

14:31

generalized is that experience, because

14:34

we know there's this opioid

14:36

crisis that's kind of cutting

14:38

through rural America, small town

14:41

America right now. Well,

14:44

on the drug addiction point, in a lot

14:46

of ways mom was sort of on the

14:48

vanguard of this crisis that has become incredibly

14:50

epic, right? So it is now

14:52

the leading cause of accidental death in the

14:54

United States surpassing gun violence is

14:56

overdoses from drugs.

14:59

And it's especially acute in Ohio, which actually

15:01

leads the nation in the number of drug

15:04

overdose deaths last year. So it's a very

15:06

significant problem. And

15:08

then the story, the way that mom

15:11

encountered it in some ways, I remember,

15:14

and this is the sort of, like you said,

15:16

the process of self discovery that the thing that

15:18

really caused her to start taking drugs the first

15:20

time was the death of my grandfather, her dad,

15:22

my papal. And you start

15:25

to feel a little bit of pain and maybe

15:28

you take some drugs because it makes things better.

15:31

And then all of a sudden you're in this

15:33

addictive cycle where the best way to get high,

15:35

the cheapest way to get high is very often

15:38

an illegal substance that's very, very dangerous. And so

15:40

that's really where mom has found

15:42

herself. And for so much of my

15:44

life, I was very resentful towards her. I had built her

15:46

up as sort of a villain in my mind, but

15:49

the more that I realized that

15:51

she wasn't just existing in

15:54

a vacuum. She wasn't this person who was

15:56

born out of nowhere and did

15:59

all these things to me. Lindsay that were

16:01

bad, she was in fact a person who

16:03

had carried around the scars and the demons

16:05

from her own past and her own childhood.

16:08

And you know the

16:10

most difficult part of writing a book was

16:12

starting to see the ways in which the

16:14

way I had grown up and I had

16:16

this sort of hubristic attitude of I've gone

16:19

to Yale Law School, I've made it, I

16:21

have achieved the American dream, and I didn't

16:23

quite realize that the way that I grew

16:25

up it actually really impacted me too. And

16:28

recognizing that, recognizing that some of the

16:30

traits that I saw on mom that

16:32

I hated also existed in me, made

16:34

me realize that maybe I was being a little bit

16:37

too hard on her so I think writing the book

16:39

really gave me some perspective and some compassion for her.

16:41

But in a sense when you're a child and

16:43

you there are a lot of men that came

16:46

in and out of your life, you didn't really

16:48

have a relationship with

16:50

your dad, but and

16:52

you had a lot of sort of substitutes

16:54

that cycled in and out of

16:56

your life. You got to develop a kind of

16:59

hard bark in

17:01

order to survive that. Yeah,

17:03

I'm not trying to make

17:05

excuses for you man. But

17:07

here's my question. What

17:10

did that mean for you?

17:13

And you know obviously your grandparents

17:15

filled a role that

17:17

you desperately needed, but what

17:21

did the absence of a consistent sort

17:23

of father figure

17:26

in the home do

17:29

to you? Well

17:32

one, it was just unstable, right? Because there

17:34

were constantly people coming in and out of

17:36

our lives. Sometimes we were moving with those

17:38

people, sometimes they were moving with us. I

17:41

just remember feeling like my childhood was very

17:43

chaotic, that you know our address was

17:45

always changing. Sometimes it would be hard for me

17:47

to remember my address because there were so many

17:49

recent ones. And that's the

17:52

biggest takeaway. That's the thing I remember most

17:55

is this feeling of true chaos and not

17:57

being especially grounded. Whenever

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JD Power 2023 award information, visit

23:04

jdpower.com/awards only at a sleep number

23:06

store or sleepnumber.com. I'm

23:09

John King, Chief National Correspondent for CNN. I've

23:11

been covering presidential elections for nearly four

23:13

decades and this one feels really different.

23:16

It's the rematch nobody wants and it's the

23:18

voters who are the most frustrated, the least

23:21

happy with their choices who are going to

23:23

decide this thing. That's why

23:25

I've been traveling the country talking to them. Join

23:27

me for All Over the Map, where we visit the biggest

23:30

battlegrounds of the 2024 race and

23:32

we hear from voters who are working through their

23:34

choices in real time. Listen

23:36

to All Over the Map, part of the

23:38

assignment with Audie Cornish, wherever you get your

23:40

podcasts. And

23:46

now back to the show. really

46:00

obsessed with the day-to-day politics of this thing

46:02

and I suspect that it's it's

46:05

not the day-to-day the week-to-week even

46:07

the month-to-month isn't gonna matter so much Trump's

46:09

core working-class voters it's gonna be the year-to-year

46:11

and so he's got a pretty long leash

46:14

but he doesn't have a leash forever. We're

46:17

gonna take a short break and we'll be right back

46:20

with more of the axe files. And

46:31

now back to the show. One

46:37

of the things that clearly comes

46:40

through in your book and really is concerning

46:42

and it's happening not

46:44

just here but everywhere in the world is

46:47

the sort of diminution

46:50

of trust in institutions

46:53

and you you write about sort

46:55

of the stuff that you

46:57

heard from family and friends

47:00

from your old community

47:03

and from let's see

47:07

you write with little trust in the press

47:09

there's no check on the internet conspiracy theories

47:11

that rule a digital world. Barack Obama is

47:13

a foreign alien actively trying to destroy our

47:15

country everything the media tells us is a

47:17

lie many in the white working

47:20

class believe the worst about their society

47:22

here's a small sample you said from Alex

47:24

Jones the right-wing radio talker on

47:27

the anniversary of 9-11 a documentary about the

47:29

unanswered questions of the terrorist attacks suggesting that

47:31

the US government played a role in the

47:34

massacre of its own people on

47:38

Obamacare legislation requiring microchip

47:40

implantations and new health

47:42

care patients from

47:45

the popular website world net

47:47

daily the notion that the

47:49

government was behind the Newtown

47:51

massacre to spur an anti-gun

47:53

movement and

47:56

from multiple internet sources suggestions that Obama will

47:59

soon implement law in order to

48:01

secure power for a third presidential term, we can

48:03

now safely reassure

48:06

people that that did not happen. But we're not

48:08

out of the woods yet. There's always 2020 or

48:10

2024. Yeah, exactly.

48:14

We can't trust the evening news. We can't trust

48:16

our politicians, our universities, a gateway to a better

48:19

life are rigged against us. We can't get jobs.

48:21

You can't believe these things and

48:24

participate meaningfully in society. And you're

48:26

right. So how

48:29

does this play out over time? And

48:31

if Trump disappoints these folks,

48:34

do they look for

48:36

alternatives in the mainstream,

48:39

or do they become

48:41

more radicalized? Well,

48:43

they may very well become more

48:46

radicalized. And I think this issue

48:48

frames a really important topic for

48:50

the mainstream media, which I

48:53

do think is an important civic institution in

48:55

our democracy. And obviously, its credibility is pretty

48:57

low. I've been critical

48:59

of some of the conspiracy theories that are

49:01

out there. Obviously, I don't believe them. But

49:04

I also think that for the mainstream media

49:06

to be a good arbiter of truth, it

49:08

has to be really careful and has to

49:10

guard its credibility. And this has been especially

49:12

tough in the age of Trump with Twitter,

49:15

right? Where I feel like every day, some

49:17

new piece of information comes out, it gets

49:19

tweeted 10,000 times. And then

49:21

two hours later, somebody comes back and says,

49:23

oh, no, that wasn't actually true, right? The

49:25

MLK bust issue, there was an issue about

49:27

treasury regulations being favorable to the Russians even

49:29

yesterday. Yeah. And I was responding, I

49:32

ended up correcting my, you know, I raised

49:34

the question as to whether this wasn't the

49:36

beginning of some sort of relaxation

49:39

of sanctions. And,

49:42

you know, there were some clarifications. Part of it

49:44

is on the administration because they weren't very adroit

49:47

at explaining it in the first place. Yeah.

49:49

Yeah. And I think that that's admirable to

49:51

sort of, you know, walk that stuff back.

49:53

I didn't know that you had tweeted about

49:55

that, but I saw a couple of others

49:58

had. But it worries me that we have

50:00

this news cycle. that is almost designed to

50:02

undermine mainstream media's credibility.

50:04

And I just think it's really important, and I include

50:07

Fox News in that, whether it's sort of right of

50:09

center or left of center. These

50:11

are really important institutions, and

50:13

I'd like to see people actually believe them, but

50:15

for people who believe them, they have to be

50:17

a little bit more guarded, I think, about the

50:20

information that gets out there. And that's especially tough

50:22

in this era. There's one other

50:24

really interesting point about this, which goes

50:26

to this cultural and geographic segregation that

50:28

we have. And a couple

50:30

of weeks ago, Obama did something at the

50:32

very end of his term, some sort of

50:35

grant to the Palestinians in one form or

50:37

another. I don't remember the exact policy, but

50:40

there were a lot of conspiracies that circulated

50:42

in response to it. Oh, look, see, this

50:44

shows that Obama was just secretly a foreign

50:47

agent who was trying to undermine US national

50:49

security. And somebody asked

50:51

me about this and said, I saw

50:53

this policy. It seems pretty problematic. Do

50:56

you think that what they're saying

50:58

about the president is true, that he's

51:01

really in service of some foreign agenda?

51:04

And I said, you know what? I

51:06

don't have any view on the policy because I don't even

51:08

know what you're talking about. I haven't read it or read

51:10

about it. But I actually think he's

51:12

a pretty good guy. I know people who've worked

51:14

for him. And I think whether you

51:17

agree with his politics, he seems like a pretty

51:19

decent guy. You actually wrote an essay on this.

51:21

Yeah. But what was so interesting is that

51:23

the person said, oh, that's really good to know because he seems

51:25

like a good guy. I never vote for him, but he seems

51:27

like a good guy. That's good to know. And

51:29

it's like that having someone who's

51:31

connected to institutions of media who

51:34

can sort of say, oh, yeah,

51:36

yeah, they're not all just making

51:38

stuff up because they're part of

51:40

this bubble, this self-protective bubble. But

51:43

someone you actually know being part of

51:45

these institutions makes them seem a little

51:47

bit more available to you

51:49

and makes them seem a little bit more believable,

51:51

right? It's actually, if you think

51:53

about it psychologically, if you knew not a

51:55

single person who was reporting the news on

51:58

CNN, you didn't know a single producer. Seriously.

1:00:01

But what caused me to move back, I always the first question, that one's the

1:00:03

easiest one. I've wanted to move back since I

1:00:05

was, since I left for the Marine Corps in 2003. And

1:00:08

I remember in bootcamp where

1:00:10

I was so homesick and

1:00:12

after a couple of weeks, the drill instructors would

1:00:15

say, if you're still homesick, you should just go

1:00:17

home because you don't belong here. You know, you

1:00:19

should be ready to completely detach yourself from your

1:00:21

home. And I basically have been homesick since that

1:00:23

moment and it never stopped, right? So

1:00:25

I've come back to college. You wrote

1:00:27

about coming back to Middletown, you've, that

1:00:30

you felt sort of alien because of your

1:00:32

experience. Yeah, it's not always easy, right? I

1:00:34

mean, there are definitely things and experiences that

1:00:37

I've had that make it a little bit

1:00:39

hard for folks from back home, especially family,

1:00:41

to really understand what my new life is

1:00:43

all about. But that all said, that's

1:00:45

a relatively minor way to scale. Where in the hell

1:00:47

are you moving? I'm going to move

1:00:49

to Columbus. Yeah, just because it's centrally located. But

1:00:51

you know, always, I've always wanted to move back

1:00:53

home. And so this seemed like as good a

1:00:55

time as any. I have this platform. There are

1:00:57

a couple of issues that I really care about.

1:00:59

So we might as well go back and talk

1:01:01

about them. And I'm going to found a small

1:01:03

little nonprofit to work on the opioid crisis specifically.

1:01:06

This question about running for office, I should probably get better

1:01:08

at answering this question than I am right

1:01:10

now because a lot of folks are just giving a chance

1:01:12

to practice. But

1:01:15

no, I mean, you know, in the abstract, the

1:01:17

idea of public service has always appealed to me

1:01:19

and it's something that I'd be interested in doing

1:01:21

eventually. But I think when people ask it, they

1:01:23

mean in the short term. And that just seems

1:01:26

hubristic and a little bit weird to think about

1:01:28

running for office in the short term. Well, let

1:01:30

me give you a hint as an old political

1:01:33

consultant. Probably it's

1:01:35

not the first thing you should say when

1:01:38

you return from Silicon Valley that I'm here

1:01:41

to save you. I

1:01:43

probably wouldn't go over that well. But

1:01:47

listen, I

1:01:49

really do encourage you to think about it.

1:01:51

One of the things that worries me is

1:01:53

that really bright, successful people are

1:01:56

so appalled by the process that

1:01:58

they don't want to get.