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With Biden out of the presidential race, James David Vance represents a new (yet old) way of perceiving the United States. He is the Apostle Paul of Trumpism, resembling characters from Clint Eastwood movies and representing both the American dream and a provincial America that is increasingly becoming a thing of the past
At the Republican Party convention in Milwaukee, Senator James David Vance, the vice-presidential nominee on Trump’s ticket, said that when his grandmother died in 2005, 19 loaded guns were found hidden in different parts of the house: under the bed, in a closet, in a cutlery drawer. She needed them to protect herself from other Americans.
Suddenly finding himself at the center of the international press (Pluralia actually praised him back in the old days), it seemed as if 39-year-old Senator James David Vance had emerged from the pages of Cormac McCarthy – or perhaps from the Clint Eastwood movies. His America is not simple, and the Senator has absorbed many of its most challenging aspects. He seems a close relative of Ed Tom Bell, the good sheriff from No Country for Old Men; he has the same charm as the sparring partner in Million Dollar Baby. He’s an American who recognizes the risk of his civilization sliding into the abyss, as in the acclaimed movie The Road, but can also feel sympathy for aliens, as the protagonist of the 2008 film Gran Torino.
Senator Vance’s story can be interpreted as an attempt by life itself to imitate art – certainly a very American attempt; an attempt by America of the past, with a happy ending invented by art to make up for all the injustices of life. Senator Vance is not a favorite of Wall Street or Big Pharma – he is the godson of failure and then retribution. Living inside him is the American Dream and, at the same time, the dreams of those who could not achieve it: victims of overdose, fentanyl, poverty, marginalization, and despair. A US Marine Corps veteran who has been to Iraq, he learned the lesson from the war: tragic loss of life must be prevented – even on the border between Russia and Ukraine.
In short, it is a symbol, a complex combination of John Steinbeck and Ernest Hemingway, Patrick Deneen and Peter Thiel, Lina Khan and Alasdair MacIntyre, Amy Lynn Chua and Ross Douthat, or, to be more precise, it is a dense web of biographies, narratives, and ideas that strongly stand out of the ordinary, where the protagonist confronts historical, sociological, and family tragedies. His Hillbilly Elegy, an epic of hillbilly life, is a most memorable book about the past that doesn’t want to go away and become that very past, about America that made itself loved, that came back on paper, in images, in ambition, about the heroic and eternal greatness of humanity. Transparent America – even in its dreams and follies.
Kimberly Cheatle, when the entity she led was at the center of a heated debate, began promoting a way to solve problems through political correctness
A very different America is the America of Thomas Matthew Crooks, whom we still know only as someone who shot Trump. We now know almost everything about Senator Vance and, above all, we want a glimpse into his future. At the same time, we know almost nothing about Thomas Matthew Crooks, but would like to only know more deeply his past.
The attempt on Donald Trump’s life is a mystery shrouded in secrecy, a mystery hidden under a cloak of the deepest secrecy. Investigators are inquiring into the life of Thomas Matthew Crooks; so far, they have examined in great detail all the data stored on his computer, two phones, his family, his classmates, his bedroom, his social media, and his family tree. Nothing that would result in a young kid firing shots in Pennsylvania. A short life passed literally in the dark, except for an hour before the shots were fired: he was spotted, reported, photographed, videotaped by many ordinary citizens, except for eight thousand employees of the Secret Service, whose budget exceeds three billion dollars a year. Sooner or later the official truth about what happened will be established, but in the meantime, we are wandering in the dark.
Kimberly Cheatle, the female head of the Secret Service, beat all possible competitors to win the Guinness Book of World Records in the category “Shameless Eyes.” As if speaking not of herself but of the late Pleistocene era, she told ABC News that what happened was “just unacceptable,” that her agents did not climb up and check the very roof from which Thomas Matthew Crooks fired because it was “sloping” and one of the agents “could have gotten hurt.” She can say whatever she wants because she is well respected locally and has many solid patrons. Such as, for example, Dick Cheney who she was next to at the worst moment of 9/11. Or like President Biden himself, with whom she was side by side during the long years of his vice presidency under Obama. In 2022, President Biden said he had “full confidence” in her, thus endorsing her for the high office in 2022. Even after the attack on Trump, Homeland Security chief Alejandro Nicholas Mayorkas (who is himself an anti-record holder: an impeached presidential cabinet member has not been seen since the nineteenth century) said he had “100 percent confidence in her.”
The Secret Service has previously been rebuked for some shortcomings, such as destroying evidence that would have helped better reconstruct the scandalous attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021. Kimberly Cheatle, when the entity she led was at the center of a heated debate, began promoting a way to solve problems through political correctness that put minorities at the forefront. In short, at the very best, the mystery might contain neither a secret, nor a conspiracy, but a colossal failure of competence. Against these conundrums and these failures, against the way in which domestic (and foreign!) affairs are managed, another America has now risen up – the country of Senator James David Vance, who has a very different vision of life and the world than Blinken, Sullivan, and the like, different than movements such as “cancel culture” and “defund the police.” The chasm between these two Americas is quite deep.
From domestic to foreign policy, from economic to security policy, a different America could be in power in November – different from today on the most important issues and with a different balance of power in both the House and Senate. They say Senator Vance can be compared to the Apostle Paul in the philosophy of Trumpism: the Senator is a convert who spreads the gospel far more widely and actively than the teacher himself. We are in for a long and bitter confrontation between a great many souls in America, but the closest and most visible confrontation will be in foreign policy.
