Can JD Vance Survive Donald Trump? (Part 1)

Donald Trump has a bad habit he finds talented and vicious people and he brings them close to his inner circle and sooner or later he sends them to the woodchipper. So why does JD Vance think his story will end differently? Welcome to the rest of Wildex US, our new series, JD Vance, Trump's Air, or Trump's Victim. I'm Anthony Scaramucci. And I'm Cate Kay. So just a few years ago JD Vance was one of Trump's fiercest Republican critics. Today he's become though one of his most loyal defenders and honestly it's one of the most extraordinary political transformations in modern American politics. Over the next four episodes we'll go through Vance's journey from a chaotic childhood in Appalachia to Yale Law School to Silicon Valley, Peter Teals in a Circle and his best selling memoir that made him famous and finally brought him into Donald Trump's orbit. But it just isn't a story about one politician, it's about power, loyalty, reinvention and what happens? What happens when ambition collides with one of the most unpredictable figures in modern politics? By the end of this series, we'll try to answer one question, is JD Vance the natural air to MAGA? Or is he simply the latest politician to believe, excuse me, Mike Pence, that he can survive Donald Trump before that woodchipper motor starts, Cate. That's the big question. Let's get going here. This episode is brought to you by E. Toro. A tariff, a spending plan, a regulatory change. It can all start just as the first line of a speech. But it sets in motion things that can reach far beyond Washington and unfold for years to come. That's right, Cate. Mark has moved on expectations. Not just events, investors are constantly weighing. What a decision could mean for companies, sectors and the wider economy. So E. Toro is an investing platform where you can access a wide range of markets and explore how political and economic developments could affect them. You could also learn from the global community of investors and see how people around the world are interpreting the same news. As with all investing, your capital is at risk, C-e-toro.com/tripus for full terms. So let's take us back because I think J.D. Vance's history and where he comes from is super important. I've just been rereading his memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, and you can see so many echoes of Vance today and his political beliefs and his conservatism, his version of conservatism in his childhood. He was actually born James Donald Bowman in Middleton, Ohio in the Midwest. Appalachia is this long, mountainous region that stretches from the deep south to the fringes of the industrial Midwest and Northeast. It takes in states like Ohio and Kentucky and West Virginia right down into Tennessee. Walton is a town of people who had been dependent, like many people in Appalachia, on blue collar jobs, like in much of the Rust Belt. But those jobs by the time J.D. comes along, they are gone. It's largely a white population and it includes some of the poorest areas in the whole of the United States. So that's the background to the area he grew up in. Tell us a little bit about his family unit. Well, I mean, the thing that I understand, I just want to set the scene for everybody. Some people call this Appalachia, then they don't know it. If they call it Appalachia, then they're from the area, right? And so I used to be involved with a college down there called Berea College. And what is Berea College? Is in Berea, Kentucky? And what do they do? They give free tuition and they take people out of these coal mining shacks, Caddy. I mean, this is the 2020s, they're living without hot water in the house. They have a propane tank outside the house and they're heating the water. They're bringing it into a basin to get themselves washed. They have a outhouse, which is basically a hole in the ground where they will use that as their place to go to the bathroom. And I just want to set the scene for you. The people are very, very poor and when you're in a poor situation like that, psychologically, it can lead to lots of desperation, which leads to pain relief, mental pain relief, Caddy. That could be alcoholism. It could be opioid addiction. It could be just the struggles to move day to day. And so, JD Vance was born to a mom who struggled with alcohol addiction and opioids. He was also in an abusive situation. The mother was abusive. He writes about it in Billie Elegie, "Wouldn't made him a darling." And Caddy, correct me if I'm wrong, before JD Vance arrived on the political scene, was he a darling of the left, yes or no? That book, "Kill Billie Elegie," with its descriptions as you've just kind of laid it out of life in Appalachia and what it had been like for America's largely white working class over the last 30 years, made JD a sort of translator of America's white working class to Liberals, who after the 2016 election realized that they had missed something big in America. This was a whole area of the country they just didn't understand, and when he released Hill Billie Elegie, they looked to him as somebody who could explain that world to them because he was brought up not just geographically in it, but his family unit was typical of many families as he writes in the book in Appalachia. So, although he was born Bowman, he has the name Vance. Why does he have the name Vance? His father gave him up for adoption when he was a child to one of the many stepfathers. He talks about this revolving door of men who came through his life after his parents divorced, and at one point his father gives him up for adoption. JD says it was the worst day of his life, he burst into tears, he's absolutely devastated by this. Later on, his father will tell him, "I wanted to keep you, but your mother said it would ruin you and you needed to grow up with your stepfather of the time, and so he takes his stepfather's name for a little bit, and in the end, he ends up with the name of his grandparents, his mother's mother and father's name, which is Vance, and they turn out really to be the kind of most important people in his life. I mean, it's extraordinary the kind of, just going back through the book. I had forgotten how well he writes, Anthony, and how well he writes about this family unit that he grows up in. He tells the story of his mother at one point who's about to lose her nursing job because he's back on opioids and weed again, and so she asks young JD, who is a child in school, to give her a clean urine sample. Because without a clean urine sample, she's going to lose her job because she's suddenly being drug tested and she has till tomorrow to come up with that urine sample. His neighbour who falls asleep because she's on drugs and the bath overflows, and so the police and everything in her house is ruined. It's the famous story of his grandmother, Moore Moore, who's the most important person in his life, really, who sets fire to her husband because he comes home drunk again. I mean, his mother in the car journey, who is turning around and literally beating the kids up on this car journey, for no real reason because the tension has got so hard. She's threatening to crash the car. He ends up fleeing to his neighbour's house, Gattie. He's then has to lie to the investigators to protect her, okay? And so he's 12 years old. You got to think of the pain going on here now. I think about how young and think about the adulting and you have to perentify now to protect your parent. But I want to read this to you because I took it from the book at 12 years old. I learned the family survival skill, protect the powerful, unstable figure at the center of your life, no matter what they did to you, okay? That is what he's doing now for Donald Trump, okay? He will lie and shapeshift himself, but he learned how to do this at this super young fragile age. So much shapeshifting in his childhood and it is a survival technique you're right, Anthony. And he's deploying it today at the highest levels of the U.S. government, the highest levels of global government, that shapeshift that you see as a result of that car incident is in full glory today, Gattie. I want to go back for a second because most politicians flip flop on issues. JD Vance flip flopped on his birth certificate. His name and his personality, but this is a story that is real and this is a story that's an addendum to what's a matter with Kansas Do you remember Thomas Frank's book what's a matter with Kansas? Yeah, and so just quickly for our viewers 2005 Thomas Frank came out and said why are these Conservatives in Kansas that live in the Bible belt voting against their own interests? Okay, and this was really the germination of what became MAGA because you've heard me say on the show caddy that these are social Conservatives that are fiscally liberal. They want the government programs But they want to adhere to some rigid orthodoxy in the Bible and Vance is living in this world and so Thomas Frank's in 2005 writes about this world and then 11 short years later We get a young man born in 1984 that actually lives in this world caddy And he's telling you about the struggle going on in the world and Bonnie. I mean, I love this woman, okay? Mima Bonnie blatant Vance, I mean how could you not like this person? She's getting married. We think 13 or 14 when she dies There are 19 loaded handguns stashed around the house. I mean come on, okay, and so This is somebody who to me JD Vance looks at and He's like okay, there's something wrong with every one of these people. I don't want to be these people and he's changing names He's trying to find his identity. So this is a high IQ person who's got a strong ambition caddy from day one And he's looking around and saying wow, how did I get born into this situation but caddy? I don't think Vance's childhood is really that unique Given the area that he grew up in so tell us about that area. Tell us about what happened economically to that area So he spends time between Ohio Where his more more and his mother are living and Kentucky where his biological father are living and the Kentucky setup Just seems to be a little bit more calm. It's More religion in the family his father has converted and goes to church every week And so that's a little bit of a relief for him But overall in both places that he grows up in Jackson and in Middleton It's super poor. I mean half of the town's children in Jackson Kentucky are living in poverty The white working class in both of those areas are struggling Social mobility is really down the economic prospects are pretty minimal Divorce and poverty rates are high by national standards and as we mentioned drug addiction in Appalachia is a real problem ran There have been so many good books that have been written on how that area of America became kind of ground zero for the opioid crisis But a lot of it came out of you had people who worked in the coal mines They got injuries from working in the coal mines. This was dirty difficult work. A lot of people got injuries They were given these prescription medications and then you had these pill mills that set up and the opioid crisis exploded in Poor Appalachia it accounts for something like this point 30% of the US population but nearly 50% of the deaths from opioid are actually Taking place in Appalachia and I think that is also key to understanding vans because as you read Hilbaly Elegy again It is this amazing portrait, but there's also a clear Political voice that emerges from it and I've known people from this region who have said to me They don't like the book because they feel JD Kind of lacked empathy for the people he's writing about that he's writing about there's one person I knew from very close to where JD grew up said he wrote about our problems. He got rich off our problems But he did nothing to help us and when you read back over the book you see some of that and he's very angry about the opioid crisis Understandably he's angry about his mother for her addiction He's angry about this neighbor and he's kind of pretty dismissive of his neighbor for the way She throws away her life because of this opioid Crisis, but it really is. It's a regional issue and it started I think Anthony in the process of deindustrialization and moving away from the coal mines Which have been such a huge source of income right in that area and he talks about this in the book and this is something that Trump is Jumping on in 2016 and it helps the right Trump in the presidency But before I get there's want to ask you this question. Do you think there's some self hatred in the book or you think there's some self Hatred about his family or hatred about his economic environment. Is that is that what you think that's such a good question I think there is some Anger towards the class he grew up in about this woman patty who passes out in the bath that had overflowed because of drugs He writes this is the reality of our community. It's about a naked druggy Destroying what little value exists in her life You know on the same kind of story he then goes on to say we talk about the value of hard work But tell ourselves that the reason we're not working is some perceived unfairness Obama shut the coal mines the Chinese took our jobs our homes are a chaotic mess. We scream and yell at each other It is a good question Anthony because it struck me reading it again when it hadn't when the book came out The first time I didn't really read it like that But he is harsh about the people he grew up with and he's kind of saying That was their choice and that was their responsibility. You can hear the libertarian voice in him You can hear the conservative voice in him that is saying They needed to fix those problems themselves. They chose that chaos And throwing away what little value exists of her life. I mean, that's that's a very scathing comment on his neighbor It's interesting because I I feel like I've read I have a revised thought because of his political life So I'm going to go back to me reading that book in 2016 And I didn't see the self hatred there. I see the self hatred now because of the way his career manifested But if you just read the book here's an author by the name of JD Vance He went into the Marine Corps. He tried to build himself up ended up at Yale I've read the book is a right-of-passage book But also talking about this deep You know talk about a K-shaped economy caddy Appalachia is at the bottom point of the downward strike of the cat right? You can't get any worse than Appalachia and and so for me I saw it that way in the beginning But I do see it the way you're suggesting your friend sees it today Because of the way his life unfolded. I just want to point out to people that this is a rich resource area There's coal there's lumber metal high nutrients soil for farming But it was stripped a few times Okay, in the 1870s people came in there and it took advantage of the area they plundered the area they did it again Right after the the gilded age and then of course there was massive de-industrialization of the United States from let's say 1990 caddy to 2010 that 20 year period of time started hollowing out these places and so now You know, there's no boom bus cycle There's just job opportunities going down in a descending line And that de-industrialization has happened all over the country Trump saw that Advanced obviously talked about it and remember the the country whether we like it or not the companies were focused on profits And less about taking care of people and the result caddy is a dismal result It's job losses is poverty is economic decline for the region And there's a there's something in the book That I just want to bring up for people and it's called middle tucky Do you remember that line in the book and so what is middle tucky that the middle tucky is Parts of Ohio that are adjacent to Kentucky where they call it middle tucky because you've you've actually imported poverty And you imported some of the values and the culture of the Appalachian region. It's sort of spilled over Into Ohio, you know And in Pennsylvania because you know my family's from Pennsylvania The right side of the state is like Washington DC and New York the left side of the state is like Ohio But the middle of that state, you know, we used to call that pencil Effing tucky caddy K pencil effing tucky. Why do we call that because it was like in tucky It was barren and so when these guys go off on vans and say that he plundered them and so on and so forth I get all that But I do believe that I do believe that he lived this way. I do believe that he had this level of this fun There's authenticity to these stories. I completely believe it when you read these stories They're so graphic and so well memorized. I think that was his reality. So let's zoom out then from his world and growing up there to what that meant for the politics of the region. Because in a way, the politics reflects both the economy and the culture. This is a working class area where people are very dependent on welfare, where the economy was had been thriving, but with kind of industries that have gone and so now people are struggling. And I think that explains some of the politics of that region. And since the 1960s, of course, both Ohio and Kentucky have been bellweathers until Donald Trump came along and made them firmly Republican. Ohio voted the way of the national election every time from 1964, in fact, until 2020 when it voted for Trump over Biden. Kentucky went the way of the winner in every election from 1964 until Barack Obama's election in 2008 when it voted Republican, and it's voted Republican, never since, but you can see that during that period when it was more economically processed for us when it had the industrialization, both of these states swung the way of the country. And it's partly driven, I think, by this white working class that's becoming increasingly Republican and Trumpist that you've now see them become solidly in the red column. So that is the world that J.D. Vance grew up in. We're going to take a quick break, join us afterwards, and we're going to talk about how Vance manages to pull himself out of this chaotic upbringing. And we're back from the break-in. So, Katty, this is the world advance is growing up in. And what's incredible, Katty, he's born in 1984. And I'm not going to date Katty Kaye, so I'm just going to speak for myself. I was a junior in college in 1984, just to give you a sense for how young I think Vance is, okay? But I just want to go back to 11, okay, which is 1995 for Vance. He's 11, his father comes back into his life, and he says that they had a pretty decent relationship and they saw each other regularly. And then when he's 13, his grandfather died. And this sent the family into a downward spiral 'cause he was sort of a psychological anchor. And then the mother's full on prescription drug addiction goes out of control. And so that's the point, Katty, where he does move in with his grandmother for a bit. And he's going back and forth. He sees sawing, ping-ponging between the mom and the dad. And then his mom is going from part of the partner, and that's when his personality has to make all these adaptations. He's the good brother to his step, either they're not married, but the children of the boyfriend. He likes cars in one incident. He likes cops in another incident. He's not doing great in school, but he's very, very smart. I guess what he does, what every kid does, he starts to smoke and drink weed. So put it together for me, Katty. You're a mom. Put it together for me. Imagine this struggle, 11, 12, 13, 14. You're getting seesawed around, and you're living in this very poor, desperate environment. I mean, look, when you put it like that, Anthony, it's amazing that JD Vance has turned out as stable and successful as he has, right? Because this was clearly the worst possible conditions for any teenager to grow up in. Things do get a bit better when he moves back in with his grandma. She pushes him to get back on track in school. And he gets himself a part-time job at the local Dilman's grocery store. And he sees there's something that informs his politics later on. There he is. He's going and working in the store as much as he can. He has to skip time with his little siblings on a family, they have a family day out because his moremore says to him, no, you've got a job, you've got to go. You can't just give up. She's pretty tough on him, but he credits her with shaping his worldview and with shaping his kind of attitude and I think giving him the skills that will help him later on in life. But he learns something really interesting at Dilman's. He's working on the checkout system and he sees how people, as he says it, game this with the welfare system. He says they would ring up food with their food stamps. They've been given these food stamps with the government and they use those to buy their groceries. But then they use cash to buy beer and wine and cigarettes, he says. They check out while speaking on their cell phones, JD does not have a cell phone. People in his family are too poor to have cell phones. And he writes in the book, "I couldn't understand why our lives felt like a struggle while those living off of government large s enjoyed trinkets we couldn't afford." And I think that it's so interesting watching the kind of political shaping of JD Vance's conservatism and his skepticism of the welfare state, his skepticism of government, while he's actually learning it kind of on the ground. And maybe he superimposes this afterwards, but it sounds like there is this teenager looking at his paycheck, realizing that there is a line in his two weekly paycheck deducted for taxes, but thinking to himself, my taxes are spoiling people. They are making people fail. They're making them lazy and cheaters as he describes it. And that's not what he wants to be. So what does he do? And I've heard this story before from people in Appalachia, if you want to make it out of there, what's your root, Anthony? What's the way you get out of towns like this? - We know the root. It's the US Armed Forces. It's going into the army, the Navy, the Marines. And Vance chooses the Marines. And so he serves for four years. He ends up at the rank of a corporal, but he's basically a combat correspondent. And he's more or less a military journalist, responsible for writing stories and taking photographs and supporting public affair operations. He gets assigned to a second Marine aircraft wing, where basically he's stationed in Cherry Point, North Carolina. And he's well fed and he's well trained. And he's in the Marine culture. And Caddy, he went to Iraq, not fighting, but let's call him a public affairs Marine, but I'm gonna just tell you something, Caddy. I was in Iraq. I went on troop support missions. And the last time I was in Iraq was actually January of 2011. And you're writing on Mount Irish. It's the road between the Baghdad Airport and the Green Zone. And they call it Route Irish because this is where all the IED explosives are, like the Irish Republican Army, up in Belfast in Northern Ireland. And so it's called Route Irish. And when you get off the aircraft, you're strapped in with armor and a helmet, and you're in one of those, you know, transport vehicles. And some of them are armor plated and some of them are not. I mean, for civilians like me, they probably were. But they said, okay listen, we're going down Route Irish. If an explosion comes off, you're not going to be able to hear me follow my hand signals. I'm telling this story because I was scared shit on my way into the Green Zone. So when somebody says that this guy was not in combat, trust me, he was in combat like situations. And he's a veteran and he deserves his status as a veteran. But he returns home, Caddy. And what does he do? He does what most veterans do. He uses the GI Bill. Tell us what happened. It's amazing. It's like, it's the story of the post-second World War era right here. So he's gone into the military as he described himself a kind of pudgy long-haired kid who lacked self belief. He comes out as a confident, healthy, strong young man. And he uses the GI Bill, which is where the government contributes money to veterans of wars for their education. It actually started after the Second World War, but it is still going when JD Vance comes back from Iraq. He uses the GI Bill to go and attend Ohio State University. This is 2007 now. And one of his part-time jobs, while he's studying at Ohio State University, which of course is going to be cheaper than some fancy Ivy League school, is to work for Bob Schulo, who's a Republican senator in the Ohio State House. He takes these part-time jobs to help pay for the college. And it's his first exposure to real politics. He also, his first exposure to doing well in school, because although he's been smart in high school, his grades remember weren't that great. He gets to university with that new found military experience and a bit more confidence to himself. And he comes out with the top grade in a degree in political science and philosophy. And he decides that he's going to apply to Yale. We should go back just for a second. Middle to know, Ohio. Mother is an addict. He's brought up in a world of revolving stepfathers, almost no money. His grandmother is the one that brings him up with tough principles. And this is the kid who makes good. He goes to the military. He goes to the local state college. And then he makes the big leap. And he goes to Yale University. And he gets a spot in Yale Law School. They also didn't just accept him. They were so impressed by him. They offered him almost free education. for the first year of law school. He has said Antony that graduating from Yale was the coolest thing that he's ever done. But he also, in the book and in conversations afterwards and in articles and interviews that he's done afterwards, he's written a lot about how he felt like a fish out of water, how he didn't, you know, know the difference between Shardonnay and Sauvignon Blanc-Wine, he'd never heard of either of them, how suddenly there's this famous scene where, you know, he's going to some fancy dinner for a law firm recruitment dinner and there's all these knives and forks and he has to call his girlfriend who later becomes his wife and say, oh my god, what do I do? Which knives and forks do I use? You start from the outside inwards and you don't repeat any of the utensils. He had no idea about any of that world and he does describe himself as uncomfortable, socially uncomfortable in that world. Maybe academically loving it has great professors, but socially uncomfortable and it, you know, reminds me of when you've told these stories of going to Tufts and then going to Harvard and facing the same kind of a situation of being the social outsider. Do you see similarities between what he went through and what you went through? Well, I mean, listen, he had a way worse economic environment than I grew up, you know, my dad had a full-time job and we had a small house and, you know, we were just to the brits we were in the working class, but we were, you know, we're fine. I mean, we had enough food. I would never dishonor my dad. It's work ethic by saying I grew up poor, did not grow up poor. So it's a little different from JD that way, but I did feel uncomfortable and I did feel at a place. And, you know, when JD's joking about someone asking him, if he likes Sauvignon Blanc or Shardonnay, I still honestly don't know the difference between those two. Okay, Katty, you can, people are listening, you throw tomatoes at you. That's because you don't drink. If you did drink wine, I'm fairly sure you would know the difference. I come from a family of alcoholics and drug addicts, so I don't drink so that I can survive the gene pool that I ended up with. And so I can succeed. And so I get all of the stuff, you know, Lloyd Blanc find as a good friend of mine. He wrote a great book recently about this as well. He grew up in the housing projects in Brooklyn. He went on to become the CEO of Goldman. And so I, I feel it for Vance. I feel it for Vance. I remember the day, Katty, when I walked into the Harvard Langdale Law Library. It is like storied place. It looked like a Grecian architecture from Athens and you, you went to the fifth floor and you had to sign the scroll, Katty. Okay, and you had to put your name down. I was class of 1989 Harvard Law School. I signed my name and where did I go to school, Tufts University, and where was my hometown? And I remember my hands shaking as I was signing. I remember that's how self-conscious I was. And that's how insecure I felt about that moment. So, I know this trajectory and I can empathize with him. And by the way, he meets a woman who is more put together than him. And to use a British word, he's like, he's meeting a woman, Usha, who's more posh than him. So tell us a little bit about that interaction with Usha and how he ends up marrying her. So Usha Vance is clearly incredibly important all through JD Vance's life since he's met her, including today, where they are raising a family together in Washington. And from everything that I'm hearing, she is not particularly happy with the role that she is playing as second lady and is struggling with that. And partly it's because, you know, she meets him at Yale. She's her own independent ambitious person. She's a very hard worker. She has grown up in a suburb of San Diego as the child of Indian immigrant academics. So with a very work focused, very different from JD Vance's upbringing, much more stable, much more work focused, much more middle class. She goes to Yale, gets her law degree. She also has a masters from the University of Cambridge. I mean, she is kind of elite. If you want to point to kind of elite academic world, establishment academic world, it is Usha Vance. And JD may be because of that stability. Maybe he likes that about her that she is driven and focused and comes from a very stable world. He is very attracted to that. And of course, as we know, they get together, they will go on to get married and have children together. And she will go on to be the second lady of the United States. One quick thing before we leave him at Yale that I thought was really interesting. And that's you can people who knew JD at Yale. And today, JD Vance has become kind of synonymous in the Trump administration more broadly with being very critical of elite education. He says it's far too liberal. He's described it elite universities as expensive day care centers for coddled children. He wrote on his social media feed at one point. But actually, Anthony is interesting because Yale is still very important to him, not only does he meet Usha, but it gets involved in a lot of things. I mean, somebody who really didn't like it and who really thought this was a kind of day care center for coddled children, perhaps wouldn't have got involved at the time as much as he did. He cooks for charity fundraisers. He organizes reading groups. He has a German shepherd dog who he'd vote don't some while he's there. He leads the Yale Law Journal's flag football team. He takes full advantage of all of the kind of social and academic things that Yale has to offer. And I think it is a little bit as we saw in his childhood, some of this shape shifting, right? At that moment, it was expedient for him to fit in. He finds a girlfriend. He joins the Yale Law Journal. He's a good student. He's not a standout law student, but he's a very good student. And yet there's this kind of ambivalence in him. This sort of perhaps tension in him of needing to fit in and benefit from it all. And then when he gets into politics, what is expedient and what serves him is to attack those same elite universities that gave him so much when he was there. He writes an article in which his sister has witnessed him go through Ohio State and Yale Law School. And she says she begins to worry that his assimilation to elite culture has made him a different person. She says to him, his sister, Lindsey says that JD reminds him of the character in that Leonard Skinner song Simple Man, somebody who is kind of trying to be something that they are not. My heart goes out to this guy weirdly. Okay, I have empathy for this guy. I just think the ambition is unmoored from a set of principles. It's like I got to get there, come hell or high water. And if I have to morph myself five more times, I'm going to do that. I even have empathy for the reaction to these schools. You know, in many ways, I owe these schools like Tufts and Harvard a lot from my career success, but the flip side is, you know, they became super ultra liberal places, Caddy. You know, Trump has a point with this. There's very little balance. Your friend Claire Shipman, who's now the president of Columbia, one of the tasks that she has and you can correct me from wrong is trying to pull the thing a little bit more into the center. And so, so these schools really went hard left, Caddy. I'm just telling you. So, so I see Vance's side of things when he's speaking, but what I worry about with Vance is the lack of anchoring. And so when I get my question to you, is when you read the story and you see him today. And again, he's only 42, Caddy. Okay, he'll be younger than Roosevelt. Okay, he was send it to the president as he had 42. Okay, unless the clock keeps ticking here. And, you know, you know, and again, I want you to talk about it not just as a journalist, but as a mom and as somebody who's raised children, looking at this man and the struggle that he's had. Look, I think the big question that all of that raises about JD Vance is what this series is about, is how many more JD Vance is are they going to be? How much more is this man going to transform himself when Donald Trump is off the scene? What does JD Vance become? Does he become more mega? Or does he find a different path, perhaps more libertarian path, more traditionally conservative path that he wants to take his political career into? And I think that is what we are trying to explore. So we leave JD now having gone through his experiences at Yale Law School, and maybe the most important thing, Anthony, I think that Yale has given JD wasn't Ushevance or even his degree. It was that ticket that he gains there into a very different world. It introduced him to the billionaire who would change the course of his life. And in the next episode, we're going to meet Peter Teal, the tech guru, and follow Vance into Silicon Valley. Because that's where his politics and his ambitions and even his worldview begin to change. Okay, I think it's the least understood, and it's arguably the most important chapter of the whole story, you know? Without Teal, without Peter Teal, there's no path to Donald Trump. And without understanding that transformation, you cannot answer the biggest question of all, is JD Dance building a movement of his own, or walking into the same traps that have consumed so many of Trump's allies? 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