Poor J.D. Zero Approval Rating, Boos, Resentment Dog Him Everywhere

The culture war is raging and Washington, D.C. is the epicenter. Trump spent the weekend *winning* yet another golf tournament, or at least that’s his version of the facts. Meanwhile, his sidekick J.D. Vance took to the concert scene on Thursday night, with his wife Usha, who is now on the board of the Kennedy Center. Ever tone deaf, Vance grinned and waved when patrons of the arts began to yell at him, “You’ve ruined this place,” before they resoundingly booed him into oblivion. Vance makes zero effort to be conciliatory in any way. He refused an invitation to the Gridiron Club this weekend, where he could have made a speech about cooperation and mending fences between Americans with different views. He chose to tell the group of journalists fungoo, so fine. That’s why he deserves what he gets.

Delicious 🤣🍿….JD Vance booed at Kennedy Center pic.twitter.com/UwwkWl8Bew

— Wu Tang is for the Children (@WUTangKids) March 14, 2025

It’s intriguing that Vance even chose to show up, since he’s been quoted as saying he “didn’t know people listened to classical music for pleasure.” So you were there to slum or support wifey, or what, J.D.? Or you were stupid enough to think that you would be greeted with cheers instead of jeers?

Audience members had undergone a full Secret Service security check as Vance’s motorcade drew up at the US’s national performing arts centre, delaying the start of the concert by 25 minutes.

After news of the reaction to Vance at the concert emerged, Richard Grenell, interim director of the Kennedy Center who was recently appointed by Trump, said the crowd was “intolerant”.

In February, Donald Trump sacked the chairman of the Kennedy Center board along with 13 of its trustees, appointing himself the new chair, bringing in foreign policy adviser and close ally Richard Grenell as interim leader, and naming new board members – among them, Usha Vance. She was on the board of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra from 2020 to 2022.

“So we took over the Kennedy Center,” the president said at the time. “We didn’t like what they were showing and various other things. We’re going to make sure that it’s good and it’s not going to be woke. There’s no more woke in this country.”

The new board members have recently been given their first tour of the centre, which is home to the Washington Opera as well as the National Symphony Orchestra and hosts about 2,000 performances a year.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Thursday evening’s concert programme – Shostakovich’s second violin concerto, with Leonidas Kavakos the soloist, followed by Stravinsky’s Petrushka – got off to a slightly shaky start before settling into its stride.

Audience members nervously joked during the intermission about the apposite all-Russian programme, given Vance’s brutal dressing-down of the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, during an Oval Office blowup in February that played directly into the hands of the Russian ruler, Vladimir Putin.

Resistance to Trump’s takeover of the traditionally bipartisan Kennedy Center has begun. The producers of the hit musical Hamilton have withdrawn from a run at the institution, due to take place in 2026, and a number of individual artists have also cancelled appearances.

A group performing on the Millennium Stage in the centre’s foyer – traditional musicians Nora Brown and Stephanie Coleman – had banners onstage with them reading “reinstate queer programming” and “creativity at the Kennedy Center must not be suppressed”.

In a 2016 interview with the New York Times, Vance said he had not realised that people listened to classical music for pleasure as he reflected on his rise through the American class system after the overnight success of his memoir Hillbilly Elegy.

“Elites use different words, eat different foods, listen to different music – I was astonished when I learned that people listened to classical music for pleasure – and generally occupy different worlds from America’s poor,” he said. “Unfortunately, this can make things a little culturally awkward when you leap from one class to the other.”

But the public anger at Vance was brought on by the culture war that he and his allies have unleashed on Washington’s cultural institutions, especially the Kennedy Center.

Vance is a phony, who puts on his cloak of poverty like Trump slathers on his orange makeup.

Vance frames the book [Hillbilly Elegy] as a chronicle of overcoming severe economic disadvantage. But the details of Vance’s own writing don’t point to a childhood of material deprivation. Instead — despite the myriad troubles faced by his mother with substance abuse — Vance was raised in middle-class comfort. At one point, his parents enjoyed a six-figure income. And he was spared economic distress by a broad safety net of extended family that provided him with frequent out-of-state vacations, golf lessons, a modeling audition, and therapy. Most importantly, he benefited from a buffer of generational wealth created by his “Papaw,” who retired with a “lucrative pension” from his union job at the local steel plant.

In addition to this central sleight of hand, the memoir also includes at least one anecdote, presented as Vance’s personal experience, that appears to have been resurrected from an infamous Ronald Reagan attack on welfare recipients. “He’s just recycling old Republican saws, or tropes,” argues Lennard Davis, a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Davis is the author of the forthcoming book, Poor Things: How Those With Money Depict Those Without It.

In the pages of his book, Vance presents a dim view of the actual poor, whom he refers to as “welfare queens” and accuses of “gaming” America’s too-generous social services. And as he campaigns in 2024, Vance is wielding his book as both a shield and a cudgel, using the tale of his hardscrabble youth to distract from the fact that he’s now a multi-millionaire member of the Senate, while simultaneously lashing out at the “elites” for looking on his kind with contempt. At a recent event with fellow millionaire Tucker Carlson, Vance complained that “our leaders used my book to try to look down on their fellow citizens, rather than maybe learn something about their fellow citizens.” […]

The central conceit of Hillbilly Elegy is already a stretch. Vance wasn’t raised in Appalachia. He was born and brought up in Middletown, Ohio, a small city on the road to Dayton. His mother was also born in these suburban Ohio flats. “The guy is from north of Cincinnati,” says Rob Lalka, a Tulane University business professor who has researched Vance’s life for his recent book, The Venture Alchemists. “There are no hills, much less hillbillies.”

It was Vance’s grandparents who’d moved away from the mountains of Kentucky — as teenagers searching for a better life in the years after World War II. Vance’s exposure to Appalachia was as a young vacationer, visiting relatives. This famously has not stopped Vance from identifying as Appalachian — “a hillbilly at heart,” he writes — based on a perceived inheritance of dysfunctional family traits. “He has this notion that being a hillbilly is kind of genetic,” Davis says.

Perhaps recognizing he had more work to do to establish himself as an sympathetic figure, Vance also writes in the introduction that readers should care about his story because he’d experienced the American dream. “You see, I grew up poor, in the Rust Belt.” Vance insists Hillbilly Elegy is “the real story of my life,” and that he wrote the book because “I want people to understand what happens in the lives of the poor, and the psychological impact that spiritual and material poverty has on their children.”

This tale of “poverty” sells because of the chaos of addiction and occasional violence that unfolds in his family life, as well as the uncouth habits of his kin — who have teen pregnancies, tote guns, suffer from “Mountain Dew mouth,” and swear like sailors. These folks read “lower class” in a cultural sense.

But there’s something important missing from Vance’s rags-to-riches tale. That is the “rags” part.

J.D. Vance emerges in the pages of Hillbilly Elegy as a rich person’s idea of a poor person. (His primary self-reported marker of teen impoverishment is an inability to afford clothes from Abercrombie & Fitch.) The deceit is consequential, because J.D. uses his false credential of poverty — this “stolen valor,” if you will — to recycle right-wing claptrap about why the disinhibited poor lack the character to better their condition. “I call poor-nography,” says Davis, placing Hillbilly Elegy in a long line of “stories about poor people that are written by middle class people” that invariably appeal to a “litany of assembled myths and stereotypes” about the actual poor.

Vance is the perfect complement to Trump. He’s the non-pauper who wrote about an impoverished childhood and Trump is the trust fund baby who lies about being a “self-made billionaire.” It’s all fluff, conceit, and smoke and mirrors.

The article goes on to say, “his parents made at least $130,000 in today’s money. If he hadn’t, the figure would be north of $217,000. Either scenario would have put them into the upper middle-class in Southern Ohio in the early 1990s. Vance recalls that his parents went on a spending spree of “new cars, new trucks, a swimming pool.”

Wow, that’s some neat kind of poverty. I wish I had grown up with that level of poverty. I remember growing up with four people (three, when my mother decided to desert us, when I was age 9) in a 450 square foot apartment, not a 2,000 square foot house across from a park, like J.D.

Oh and there was “what J.D. describes as a “modest house” — on an immodest amount of land: 14 acres, including a pond, “stocked with fish,” a barn, a chicken coop, and “a couple” of fields for cows and horses. J.D. spent every other weekend and many holidays with his biological dad.” Damn, I LOVE this kind of poverty. Why didn’t I have this kind of poverty? I wonder if J.D. still considers himself poor, having taken millions from Peter Thiel to get into the Senate?

We have unbelievable characters running this government. J.D. Vance fits right in.

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