Interview: JD Vance, America’s working-class hero and author of Hillbilly Elegy, on being the “Trump whisperer”

Yet Vance, earnest, authentic, measured, held the room rapt. “Don’t do something you love, do something you like. Find a vocation,” he said. In summary, life may have dealt you a bad hand, but play it for all it’s worth.

Later, he told them tales of his own childhood: how his mother started feeding him Pepsi aged nine months, and once asked him as a young boy to pee into a cup for her so she could pass a drugs test. Today, he told them, he still likes to spend his downtime sitting around in his underpants eating ice cream and playing with his German shepherd. But for a spot of intellectual polish, he could easily have been plucked from the redneck audience to speak.

People power: Donald Trump on the campaign trail in 2016. Vance hails from the Rust Belt state of Ohio, which was key in securing Trump’s victory

DAMON WINTER / NEW YORK TIMES / REDUX / EYEVINE

“I’d be proud to raise a son like that,” said Berenice Litt, a pensioner in the crowd who had driven hundreds of miles just to watch Vance speak. “He needs to run for governor.”

What exactly Vance, still only 32, will do with the fame and influence that has followed the release of Hillbilly Elegy, which became a runaway bestseller in 2016, is a subject of no small speculation in the American media. The book phenomenon is still growing. It sits atop The New York Times bestseller list an astonishing 48 weeks after its release. Its narrative power has carried it to Britain, too, where the paperback edition is also in The Sunday Times top 10. It was recently announced that Ron Howard will direct a film adaptation of the book, which documents Vance’s remarkable journey out of a struggling Midwest community, and crucially explains why so few others are able to follow the same path.

Even more interesting than Vance’s extraordinary personal story, though, was the way his book chimed with the political moment. The 2016 election was in part the revenge of a white working class long ignored and neglected by the establishments of both political parties. This America turned out in large numbers for Trump.

Vance knows these people. He’s one of them. So he became the Trump whisperer, the voice of a forgotten tribe that rather impolitely had the gall to reassert itself on the national stage. When Trump won, Vance became a permanent fixture on CNN’s pundit couch, explaining to puzzled liberals “what these people think”.

When I first sit down for coffee with Vance, he nervously checks his watch every five minutes. He’s worried about being late for the US celebrity news anchor Megyn Kelly, who later arrives in a fleet of sleek black executive cars to record a special programme on his recent move from California back to Ohio, where he was born and spent much of his childhood. He’s come a long way in a very short space of time.

Vance is one of two new prophets who emerged in America last year, each blessed with an uncanny ability to diagnose the illnesses afflicting a great nation. The two men both spoke of abandoned factories, vanishing jobs and hollowed-out communities ravaged by drug addiction. They described a pervasive sense of decline and a nation’s desperate desire to be great again.

One of these men rode his analysis all the way to the White House, where he now sits in his dressing gown, tweeting furiously and learning some sharp lessons about the realities of life in the Oval Office.

The other was Vance, whose life story fascinated readers. He was born into a “hillbilly”, or white-trash, family — a sometimes derogatory label given to the poor rural residents of the Appalachian Mountains that run through Kentucky, Tennessee and West Virginia. Many of the stereotypes used about hillbillies are present in Vance’s book — poverty, poor education, clannish hostility to outsiders and appalling diet, which often consists of fried chicken and fizzy sodas that give the young children rotting “Mountain Dew mouth”. Violent argument was casual and common.

“As a child I didn’t learn very effective conflict resolution, especially within the context of a marriage,” he says, recalling an occasion when his grandmother threatened very seriously to kill his grandfather for getting drunk. “I didn’t know how to disagree without turning it into an earth-shattering argument.”

Vance, however, also paints a picture of a ferociously loyal community, with its own complex moral code and value system.

He was brought up between the aptly named Middletown, Ohio, and the hills of eastern Kentucky, As his own family fell apart, he battled his way through school, after which he enrolled in the Marine Corps and served in Iraq. Later he excelled at Ohio State University, won a scholarship to Yale Law School, and ended up as a venture capitalist working for the controversial tech mogul Peter Thiel, who taught him how to “think the opposite of what everyone else is thinking”. He wrote Hillbilly Elegy following encouragement from his favourite law professor, Amy Chua, also known as the “Tiger Mother” on account of her own bestselling book about strict child-rearing.

So what does he make of America’s bizarre president? “My fears thus far have been confirmed,” says Vance, who is a Republican but voted for the third-party candidate Evan McMullin. “He understands the problems, but there’s no evidence he’s actually articulating a way out.”

So what would it take for the much-discussed “Trump base”, which Vance hails from, actually to desert their man? He points out that the president gained a lot of trust by telling people things no other politician would say.

“People voted for someone unconventional,” he adds, pointing out that most Americans don’t watch cable news all day and obsess over the latest Kremlin conspiracies. “They will give him a long leash, and judge him by whether their lives have got better in two or three years.”

Some have called Vance the white Obama: a boy from a broken home who pulled himself up by his bootstraps and wrote a stonking bestselling memoir about it. He’s even written about how the former president’s moral and familial rectitude inspired him, despite their political differences.

Special counsel: Vance met his wife, Usha, at Yale Law School, where he was influenced by Amy Chua, the Tiger Mother professor

You can see why Republican power brokers salivate over him. He has a compelling personal story; he understands the Trump phenomenon, but is clearly a person of intelligence and integrity; he’s a brand name who spans the country’s great social divide — working class and donor class alike can identify with him.

Vance is big, though not fat, with piercing blue eyes and an awkward but charming manner. His gait and his accent both betray his hillbilly origins, which he’s anything but ashamed of, but his grey woollen blazer tells you that he’s moved up in life since then.

So does he plan to follow Obama’s path and aim for high office? “I certainly am not leaning into the biographical comparison,” he says. “That would be weird for me.” But he has “thought a fair bit” about the pros and cons of entering public service.

Quite sensibly, though, Vance recognises the current toxic political environment as one he might be best out of. “The Republican Party has a lot of work to do before it can achieve the things I want it to,” he adds.

Politics can wait, then, at least for now. Instead, he has moved away from the start-ups and soju shakes of San Francisco and settled in just a few miles from where he grew up.

So why did he move home? “Ohio is close to everything I care about,” he says. “I always felt a bit weird in San Francisco.” In the split between “somewheres” and “nowheres” that has underpinned so many debates about globalisation, Vance is definitively a somewhere, a person who finds meaning in place: how the grass in his home town feels underfoot, or the street corner where he once kissed a girl goodnight.

Though he likes San Francisco, he found the stark inequality between rich tech workers and impoverished homeless people difficult to live with. “San Francisco is sort of a dystopian view of what middle America sees in the future,” he says. “Two fundamental subsets of the population that are completely separated by culture and wealth, and don’t really interact with each other or feel any kinship with each other.”

Now he’s back in Ohio, Vance has started a non-profit organisation that seeks to address some of the problems he faced growing up. His family were typical Scots-Irish Appalachian mountain folk. His grandparents moved from the hills of Jackson, Kentucky, down to the plains of Ohio in search of decent blue-collar work. As America boomed, so the fortunes of the Vances rose, and they joined the lower rungs of the middle class.

Something held them back, though. Violence, drug addiction, ill-discipline and profligacy haunted successive generations. When his mother abused and neglected him, becoming addicted to opiate painkillers, it was his grandmother “Mamaw” — stern, ferocious and determined — who stepped in and put Vance through high school. Mamaw was no angel, though: after she died, they discovered 19 handguns in the house.

This was the story that really chimed with contemporary America. One of advancement and mobility, a move to the suburbs, then decline: old habits returning and once-flourishing communities falling apart. What is it that has held Vance’s family and so many others back?

There are many factors, of course, but one that Vance keeps returning to is personal failures. A culture that refuses to look in the mirror; where people use welfare cheques to buy new TVs and then blame the government for their problems. Unsurprisingly, this endears him to conservatives, but troubles many on the left (the New Republic magazine called him a “false prophet”).

“There are a lot of understandable frustrations for the white working class,” he says, “but if the only response to that is to blame other people, and there isn’t a recognition that our own communities and families need to think a little bit more constructively about our role in the problem, then I think our politics has missed something quite fundamental.”

His non-profit venture, Our Ohio Renewal, seeks to address the issues thrown up by his family and examined in the book. Child welfare, helping extended families to bring up children more easily; employment retraining, so that the working class adjusts better to globalisation and technological change.

And, of course, the opiate crisis — arguably the greatest epidemic of modern times, which kills more people than crack or HIV did in the 1980s; even more than guns do in America today. The statistics around opiate abuse are simply remarkable. In 2015, more than 20,000 people overdosed as a result of taking prescription painkillers. Some 13,000 more died from heroin overdoses, which many graduate to once their opiate prescription runs out.

Opiates blighted Vance’s childhood, and they are blighting the lives of thousands in his home state. Lax regulations, corporate greed and a culture of overuse have led to the astonishingly addictive pills being handed out like cheap candy. But Vance is also seeking to address the underlying malaise driving these desperate addictions.

During the presidential campaign, Bill Clinton described opiate addicts as “dying of a broken heart”. Vance, too, sees the overdoses as deaths of despair. “Instability, unemployment, imprisonment — all these indicators are going the wrong way,” he says. “It creates this sense among a lot of people who grew up in the neighbourhoods I grew up in that the world is falling apart. A disconnection from institutions of work and family drives this isolation and eventually has to find an outlet. For a lot of people, it’s opiates.”

Vance is hoping that his venture can help prevent some of the familial breakdowns caused by the crisis. One early proposal is to make it much easier for non-parental family guardians to be given legal control of children who they are already bringing up, just as Vance was raised primarily by Mamaw.

His experiences as a child have also made him utterly determined to succeed as a father and husband. He met his wife, Usha, at Yale. She is glamorous, ferociously bright, of Indian heritage and due to take up a clerkship at the Supreme Court (no Michelle Obama comparisons, please). What’s more, she’s patient, because living with Vance isn’t always easy. “Thankfully, Usha has seen enough good in me that I have had time to learn. I’m getting better,” he smiles.

The pair have just had a baby son, Ewan, but Vance is still haunted by fear that the curse of his Appalachian relatives will strike him, too. “That’s definitely still with me — that I’ll get dragged back,” he says. “I hear about friends and family struggling, and my immediate thought is: ‘My God, are we ever going to escape this? Is this just the life cycle of our family until the end of time?’ ”

Slowly, though, as his remarkable achievements stack up, he is starting to trust that it won’t all fall apart. As Vance talks to parents and children at the Zane State commencement, another Bill Clinton line occurs to me: “There’s nothing wrong with America that can’t be cured by what is right with America.”

Vance seems to be part of the cure, an example of America fixing itself. He came from nowhere, rose through hard work and great institutions, and is now turning around to help others do the same. The problem is that his case is so vanishingly rare, it made for a bestselling book. He knows this better than anyone. And if he really wants to change things, then ultimately, for all its flaws, politics surely awaits.

Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis by JD Vance is published by William Collins at £9.99