Poor J.D. Zero Approval Rating, Boos, Resentment Dog Him Everywhere

The culture war is raging and Washington, D.C. is the epicenter. Trump spent the weekend *winning* yet another golf tournament, or at least that’s his version of the facts. Meanwhile, his sidekick J.D. Vance took to the concert scene on Thursday night, with his wife Usha, who is now on the board of the Kennedy Center. Ever tone deaf, Vance grinned and waved when patrons of the arts began to yell at him, “You’ve ruined this place,” before they resoundingly booed him into oblivion.

Vance makes zero effort to be conciliatory in any way. He refused an invitation to the Gridiron Club this weekend, where he could have made a speech about cooperation and mending fences between Americans with different views. He chose to tell the group of journalists fungoo, so fine. That’s why he deserves what he gets.

It’s intriguing that Vance even chose to show up, since he’s been quoted as saying he “didn’t know people listened to classical music for pleasure.” So you were there to slum or support wifey, or what, J.D.? Or you were stupid enough to think that you would be greeted with cheers instead of jeers?

Audience members had undergone a full Secret Service security check as Vance’s motorcade drew up at the US’s national performing arts centre, delaying the start of the concert by 25 minutes.

After news of the reaction to Vance at the concert emerged, Richard Grenell, interim director of the Kennedy Center who was recently appointed by Trump, said the crowd was “intolerant”.

In February, Donald Trump sacked the chairman of the Kennedy Center board along with 13 of its trustees, appointing himself the new chair, bringing in foreign policy adviser and close ally Richard Grenell as interim leader, and naming new board members – among them, Usha Vance. She was on the board of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra from 2020 to 2022.

“So we took over the Kennedy Center,” the president said at the time. “We didn’t like what they were showing and various other things. We’re going to make sure that it’s good and it’s not going to be woke. There’s no more woke in this country.”

The new board members have recently been given their first tour of the centre, which is home to the Washington Opera as well as the National Symphony Orchestra and hosts about 2,000 performances a year.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Thursday evening’s concert programme – Shostakovich’s second violin concerto, with Leonidas Kavakos the soloist, followed by Stravinsky’s Petrushka – got off to a slightly shaky start before settling into its stride.

Audience members nervously joked during the intermission about the apposite all-Russian programme, given Vance’s brutal dressing-down of the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, during an Oval Office blowup in February that played directly into the hands of the Russian ruler, Vladimir Putin.

Resistance to Trump’s takeover of the traditionally bipartisan Kennedy Center has begun. The producers of the hit musical Hamilton have withdrawn from a run at the institution, due to take place in 2026, and a number of individual artists have also cancelled appearances.

A group performing on the Millennium Stage in the centre’s foyer – traditional musicians Nora Brown and Stephanie Coleman – had banners onstage with them reading “reinstate queer programming” and “creativity at the Kennedy Center must not be suppressed”.

In a 2016 interview with the New York Times, Vance said he had not realised that people listened to classical music for pleasure as he reflected on his rise through the American class system after the overnight success of his memoir Hillbilly Elegy.

“Elites use different words, eat different foods, listen to different music – I was astonished when I learned that people listened to classical music for pleasure – and generally occupy different worlds from America’s poor,” he said. “Unfortunately, this can make things a little culturally awkward when you leap from one class to the other.”

is kin — who have teen pregnancies, tote guns, suffer from “Mountain Dew mouth,” and swear like sailors. These folks read “lower class” in a cultural sense.

But there’s something important missing from Vance’s rags-to-riches tale. That is the “rags” part.

J.D. Vance emerges in the pages of Hillbilly Elegy as a rich person’s idea of a poor person. (His primary self-reported marker of teen impoverishment is an inability to afford clothes from Abercrombie & Fitch.) The deceit is consequential, because J.D. uses his false credential of poverty — this “stolen valor,” if you will — to recycle right-wing claptrap about why the disinhibited poor lack the character to better their condition. “I call poor-nography,” says Davis, placing Hillbilly Elegy in a long line of “stories about poor people that are written by middle class people” that invariably appeal to a “litany of assembled myths and stereotypes” about the actual poor.

Vance is the perfect complement to Trump. He’s the non-pauper who wrote about an impoverished childhood and Trump is the trust fund baby who lies about being a “self-made billionaire.” It’s all fluff, conceit, and smoke and mirrors.

The article goes on to say, “his parents made at least $130,000 in today’s money. If he hadn’t, the figure would be north of $217,000. Either scenario would have put them into the upper middle-class in Southern Ohio in the early 1990s. Vance recalls that his parents went on a spending spree of “new cars, new trucks, a swimming pool.”