J.D. Vance

Vice President of the United States (2025–) — Republican Senator from Ohio (2023–25) — author of Hillbilly Elegy — Marine veteran — Yale Law graduate — who transformed from a Trump critic (calling him 'America's Hitler' privately) to one of his most prominent supporters.

Creates the working-class white conservative memoir as a political genre — Hillbilly Elegy's account of Appalachian poverty, family dysfunction, and upward mobility through the Marines and Yale Law became the defining text for understanding Trump's white working-class base to liberal readers who had no direct experience of it.