MAGA Morning In America

The Start Of A New Era As Trump-Vance Win Bigly

You love to see it!

I stayed up watching election returns as long as I could — till past five a.m. Budapest time, until I could not hold my eyes open any longer. I went to sleep happy: it was all but certain by then that Donald Trump would win the presidential election. When I woke up four hours later, all had been fulfilled. The sun had risen, and brought with it a bright new day.

Before I sat down to read the papers and to think about the political implications of the Trump win, I had a big old cry over Mamaw, the gristly old chain-smoking, pistol-packing hillbilly who raised J.D. Vance, and who died in 2025.

As you know from yesterday’s dispatch, I’m sentimental about this woman. This morning, I thought about how Bonnie Blanton Vance came from deep America. She was working class. Her life, and the life of her family, were messy as hell. She’s the kind of person that the American ruling class never pays attention to, except to disdain them as “deplorable”. According to her grandson, Mamaw was a lifelong New Deal Democrat, but she had seen the party of the working man turn itself into a vehicle for liberal elites. Mamaw was one of the forgotten people.

I come from the South. I know Mamaw. People like her are supposed to accept their lot. And yes, as J.D. explained in his 2016 memoir Hillbilly Elegy, they sometimes are the chief author of their own problems. If they embody much of what is wrong with America today — again, this is in J.D.’s book — they also embody America’s deep strengths. (This too is in J.D.’s book.)

This morning I flipped through my copy of Hillbilly Elegy. If you haven’t read it, you should; it’s way more political and nuanced than the movie (but then, movies really can’t be, not like a book can). To be clear, I did not grow up like J.D. did; I came from a stable working-class family. But the Mamaws and their tribes were everywhere. They were our neighbors, sometimes even our relatives. They were real people.

J.D. wrote:

Mamaw was my keeper, my protector and, if need be, my own goddamned terminator. No matter what life threw at me, I’d be okay because she was there to protect me.

And:

Mamaw and Papaw taught me that we live in the best and greatest country on earth. This fact gave meaning to my childhood. Whenever times were tought — when I felt overwhelmed by the drama and tumult of my youth — I knew that better days were ahead because I lived in a country that allowed me to make the good choices that others hadn’t.

This is a hugely important point in the book. J.D. writes at length about the structural obstacles in America to the thriving of people who come from his circumstances. But he is equally honest about how the personal morals and ethics of those people often amount to self-sabotage. He goes on to talk about how the pandering of elites, both Democratic and Republican, to his people sets them back:

What separates the successful from the unsuccessful is the expectation they had for their own lives. Yet the message of the right is increasingly: It’s not your fault that you’re a loser; it’s the government’s fault.

J.D. is also up front about how for all Mamaw’s strengths, she simply did not have all the knowledge necessary to launch him into the world beyond hillbilly life. That would come from friends and allies he met along the way — first of all, in the US Marine Corps, which began his education in self-discipline. What stands out on this quick post-election re-reading of sections of the book is the gratitude J.D. had for all the people along the way who helped raise him up.

Thinking about it now, how close I was to the abyss, gives me chills. I am one lucky son of a bitch.

Now that lucky son of a bitch is going to be one heartbeat away from the presidency. He wrote in Hillbilly Elegy, which he penned after he had graduated from Yale Law, and was working in venture capital:

I grew up in a world where everyone worried about how they’d pay for Christmas. Now I live in one where opportunities abound for the wealthy and privileged to shower their generosity on the community’s poor.

Now we are going to see what J.D. Vance does with his inheritance. God, and Mamaw, and every other man or woman who helped him reach this pinnacle — especially his wife Usha — have given birth to a profoundly American success story. What made me weep with joy and gratitude this morning for Mamaw, but more than that, for my country. It has been a long time since I’ve felt good about America. Still, the fact that she remains the kind of place where a boy who came from the terrible circumstances of a childhood in a disintegrating society can rise out of it to become one of its most important leaders, and put his knowledge, experience, and power to work to lift up the poor and the working class, to help give them the structural help they need to get their lives back on track, as well as the moral wisdom coming from a deep well of convictions forged from the history of strong men and women who made a nation out of the New World — well, how can you not cry? How does your heart not swell at what God has given us, in America.

The American dream still lives, after all. His name is J.D. Vance, from Middletown, Ohio. Is this a great country, or what?

No one who ever met or knew Bonnie Vance in her lifetime (she died in 2005) could possibly know that she was raising a future American vice president. Such are the ways of Providence. You do the best you can, and trust God to weave the tapestry. What a privilege it was for me, and The American Conservative, to have played a role in the narrative that brought J.D. Vance, and our country, to this moment. All of you who donated to TAC back in the day should take pride in your contributions.

One week in July 2016, I read on a plane to Boston this new book, Hillbilly Elegy, that a liberal reader of my TAC blog had given to me. It had been out for three weeks, and had made a modest splash. In most cases, a book does nearly all of the business it’s going to do in its first three weeks on the market. The Vance memoir had come, and was now going.

Well, I read it, and was knocked absolutely flat by the story J.D. Vance told. I found hi on Twitter, and asked for an interview, which he cheerfully granted. On July 22, I published on my TAC blog this conversation with J.D., titled, “Trump: Tribune Of Poor White People.” It is no false modesty to say that it was not a special interview. It posted on a Friday. That weekend, the interview went megaviral, melting down the servers at TAC two or three times.

In days, J.D. Vance was all over the national media, which was still grappling with the puzzling (to them) popularity of Donald Trump, the new GOP presidential nominee. J.D. was there to explain it to them. He became a national celebrity overnight. Hillbilly Elegy rocketed to the top of the bestseller lists, and has now sold millions of copies. They made a movie out of it. J.D. became a loyal friend. He helped return the favor by coming to the Walker Percy Weekend in St. Francisville in 2019, to give a speech.

TAC and me, we were just standing at the right place at the right time. You never know what God is going to do. Never lose hope. The future is not fixed.

I’m going to write short today, because I have a very busy schedule. I’m operating on four hours of sleep, and through a relentless MAN COLD, which every male in this readership knows is worse than Ebola (though women callously refuse to recognize this). I have to go be on Hungarian TV in a few hours, and we’re having a big post-election event tonight at the Danube Institute, where my colleagues and I will be analyzing the election results for the audience (if you’re in Budapest and want to come, register on the DI site). Then I have to come home and pack to get on a plane for the US tomorrow, where I’m appearing on a panel at an ISI Conference.

But you know, I’m a happy, confident man these days, and not just because of the election results. Hope! It’s a glorious thing.

The Meaning Of Trump’s Win — Quick Hits

I have to do a deep dive on the reporting to see how all this happened, but this much is clear to me:

• Massive failure of the Democratic Party, from allowing senile Joe Biden to stay in for so long, to crowning Kamala Harris in a shotgun wedding ceremony. Most of the blame has to go to Joe Biden, though. His old-man vanity is a principle cause of disaster. Ruth Bader Ginsburg says hi.

• Trump won with an astonishingly diverse coalition for a Republican. It seems that not every non-white American buys into the liberal intelligentsia’s conviction that Race Is Everything. DEI ought to be dead, dead, dead going forward. “Multiculturalism committed suicide,” writes Dan McCarthy. And:

  

• The Democratic Party hates men as men, and it paid a price. I wonder if the party and its auxiliaries in the media, academia and elsewhere, are even capable of facing the hard fact that their woke agenda is unpopular? Serious question. They are so committed to it, and to condemning anyone who criticizes it as some kind of heretic, that I wonder how they’ll be able to climb down from it.

• The old Republican Party is kaput. Ask the Cheneys. What’s going to happen to the Never Trump sites, though — The Bulwark and The Dispatch? Where do they fit in the new political media order.

• Thank God Elon Musk bought Twitter. It became one of the only places where the lies told by the other side could be countered. For Musk and Joe Rogan, the sky’s the limit.

• Here in Hungary, we conservatives are elated. Prime Minister Orban’s investing in his personal friendship with Donald Trump is going to pay massive dividends. Hungary has been treated as a pariah by the illiberal European Union establishment, for various reasons. Now Hungary will vault to being one of America’s most important European allies. The bullies of Brussels will sit down and shut up. The jerkface American ambassador to Budapest will go home. And Budapest will at last come into its own as the international capitol of intellectual conservatism.

• Accordingly, the Orban peace mission to push for a Russia-Ukraine armistice will relaunch, I bet, under the auspices of the new administration in Washington.

• With the Republicans soon to be in charge of the White House and both houses of Congress, I hope that there will be strong and effective legislation to close the borders, smash DEI, strengthen religious liberty, protect women’s sports and private places from trans tyranny, and basically to roll back wokeness everywhere (especially in the US military). Bridget Phetasy said on X last night that, “The Democrats basically Bud Lighted their own party.” Yep.

• Send Tulsi Gabbard to the Pentagon, stat!

• What will happen to the legacy media? They are so unfathomably out of touch with the country. This is not new, but how long can it go on? I subscribe to The New York Times, and I tell you, if you only got your take on America from that newspaper, you would never, ever understand the country as it truly is. If I were Jeff Bezos, I would purge the Washington Post staff, and hire more conservatives, and in general more reporters who don’t confuse journalism with activism.

• Last word goes to conservative editor Daniel McCarthy (again), this time explaining Trump’s victory to shell-shocked NYT readers. Excerpts:

  Mr. Trump’s victory amounts to a public vote of no confidence in the leaders and institutions that have shaped American life since the end of the Cold War 35 years ago. The names themselves are symbolic: In 2016 Mr. Trump ran against a Bush in the Republican primaries and a Clinton in the general election. This time, in a looser sense, he beat a coalition that included Liz Cheney and her father, former Vice President Dick Cheney.

  Those who see in Mr. Trump a profound rejection of Washington’s present conventions are correct. He is like an atheist defying the teachings of a church: The challenge he presents lies not so much in what he does but in the fact that he calls into question the beliefs on which authority rests. Mr. Trump has shown that the nation’s political orthodoxies are bankrupt, and the leaders in all our institutions — private as well as public — who stake their claim to authority on their fealty to such orthodoxies are now vulnerable.

  This may be exactly what voters want, and by allying herself with so many troubled and unpopular elites and institutions, Ms. Harris doomed herself. Do Americans think it’s healthy that generals who have overseen prolonged and ultimately disastrous wars are treated with such respect by Mr. Trump’s critics? A similar question could be asked about the officials in charge of the intelligence community.

  But McCarthy offers this warning to the incoming president:

  If Mr. Trump and his coalition fail to create something better than what they have replaced, they will suffer the same fate they’ve inflicted on the fallen Bush, Clinton and Cheney dynasties. A new force for creative destruction will emerge, possibly on the American left.

  To prevent that, Mr. Trump will have to become as successful a creator as he is a destroyer. At the start of his first administration he lost an opportunity to take advantage of the shock that Republicans and Democrats alike felt at this election. That was a moment when a positive message, rather than one of “American carnage,” could have elevated the new president above the fray of conventional politics.

  Let us hope.