From Elegy to election: J.D. Vance turns pop culture’s soft power into real power of high office 

SINGAPORE – The worlds of American pop culture and politics – which in that country are never far apart – collided once more on July 15. Former president Donald Trump

announced that Senator J.D. Vance would become his running mate

in the November presidential election.

The 39-year-old who might become the next vice-president wrote the 2016 best-selling memoir Hillbilly Elegy, in which he detailed his poverty-stricken upbringing, one that he successfully overcame with determination and hard work.

The book was adapted into a 2020 Netflix drama directed by Hollywood film-maker Ron Howard. It starred Oscar nominees Glenn Close and Amy Adams, as well as Gabriel Basso (The Night Agent, 2023) as the young Vance.

Since the announcement, the film has roared back into Netflix’s Top 10 list. A post-announcement sales surge has also driven the paperback and hardcover formats of the book to the first and second spots respectively on Amazon.

Hillbilly Elegy is currently not available at Books Kinokuniya, but the local bookstore tells The Straits Times it will receive more stock in the coming weeks. Its staff has had several inquiries about the book since the announcement and is expecting more interest and demand as the US election gears up.

So, there might be a future when

both men at the top of the American political ladder

can boast bestsellers and shows in their pre-politics resume.

Trump: The Art Of The Deal, a part-memoir, part-how-to book, was published in 1987 and reached the top of The New York Times bestseller list.

Trump also hosted the reality TV competition The Apprentice from its first season in 2004 till its 14th in 2015.

Without the popularity gained from their books and shows, the political careers of either man would have been much harder to get off the ground. Mr Vance began serving as a senator in 2023, and Trump served as president from 2017 to 2021.

As The Washington Post observed in 2022, Mr Vance, when campaigning for a seat in the Senate, had by then begun playing up some aspects of his life. The formerly clean-shaven venture capitalist and corporate lawyer began sporting a short beard, an aggressively masculine look favoured by several men in his Republican Party, including Trump’s sons Donald Trump Jr and Eric Trump.

Hillbilly Elegy proclaimed that being born to a heroin-using mother and growing up in an economically shattered area did not mean being condemned to a lifetime of poverty. Mr Vance’s life proves it is possible to escape to prosperity.

In his 2022 campaign speeches, however, Mr Vance tended to “gloss over his famously traumatic childhood”, reported the Post, under a layer of folksy warmth. The man who railed against Washington elites “adopted a bellicose persona at odds with the sensitive, bookish J.D. of his memoir”, the article continued. The new, more populist Mr Vance now brandished fiery Trump-aligned talking points.

Hillbilly Elegy is now ranked sixth in the US on Netflix’s list of most-watched films. Most critics panned it in their reviews, with many calling it shallow because of how it exploits poverty as a backdrop without investigating its root cause. A few called it rambling, maudlin and one of the worst films they had seen in recent times.

On review aggregation site Rotten Tomatoes, the opinions of critics and audience are starkly different. Most professional critics hated it, with only 25 per cent giving it a thumbs up, while 82 per cent of the audience members did so. According to entertainment news site Collider, the critic-audience divide for Hillbilly Elegy is one of the largest on Rotten Tomatoes.

Many of the audience comments on Rotten Tomatoes are hostile to critics, saying that “they are not to be trusted”, or show “ideological bias” and that “the lower the score from critics, the better the movie”.

It indicates that Hillbilly Elegy has become politicised. It is now viewed as a film for the people, rather than for the cultural elites. These comments are commonly heard ideas put forward by Trump supporters, who like to decry the biased mainstream media, whom some have called “the lying press”.

Trump himself is no stranger to the art of massaging his image. His critics have long maintained that while he prefers to sell the myth of himself as a self-made man and business genius, he was, in fact, born into a wealthy family. This allowed him to receive more than US$400 million in loans from his father, property developer Fred Trump, as The New York Times revealed in 2018.

But they are not the first Americans to be fast-tracked into high office through the door of pop culture, nor are they the first to burnish their lives to better fit the ideal of the American Dream.

Movie star and bodybuilder Arnold Schwarzenegger became governor of California in 2003, despite having no experience in government. He was widely acknowledged to have won because he was the most famous of the 135 candidates, which included actor Gary Coleman (Diff’rent Strokes, 1978 to 1986), adult magazine publisher Larry Flynt, media columnist Arianna Huffington (before she launched news site The Huffington Post) and adult film actress Mary Carey.

In a 2023 opinion piece for the Los Angeles Times, writer Joe Mathews called the campaign a bizarre media circus, adding that Schwarzenegger’s win was a cataclysmic event that foreshadowed the way American politics would “grow louder, more populist, more direct” during the Trump years.

It would later emerge that the Austrian Oak, to use the actor’s nickname, did not quite fit his wholesome public image of the immigrant made good.

In 2011, it was revealed that while married to American journalist Maria Shriver, Schwarzenegger began an affair with the family’s housekeeper Mildred Baena in the 1990s. This resulted in the birth of a son, Joseph, who was 13 when the news of the relationship broke.

Former US president Ronald Reagan, who was in office from 1981 to 1989, was an actor who rode to power on the back of television, a medium that by the 1960s had begun to make or break political careers. In public, he projected an image of folksiness, manliness and strength.

But the 2020 docuseries The Reagans showed that there was a well-orchestrated campaign of myth-making behind this image. It showed, for example, that First Lady Nancy Reagan wielded more power than anyone had guessed. Her ideas permeated her husband’s policies on the Aids crisis and the economy.

She kept the fact of her power hidden from the press, according to an interview in The Guardian with the makers of the four-part miniseries. Their savvy handling of their public image, says the article, paved the way for Trump.

As the Reagans showed: In the age of radio, television, movies and social media, if your presentation strikes a chord with the public, the sky’s the limit.

• Additional reporting by Shawn Hoo