When JD Vance was asked in August 2016 if he knew many people who planned to vote for Donald Trump, he was unequivocal.
“A lot of people in my family, my neighbours and friends from back home. It’s a phenomenon I recognise and, frankly, saw coming pretty early,” he told the host of an American public radio chat show.
Vance, then a mere 31-year-old Yale Law School graduate working at a San Francisco biotech company, was talking about his memoir of a “family and culture in crisis”: Hillbilly Elegy.