The late-night host dug deep into JD Vance’s political shift into a rightwing troll second in line to the US presidency
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n the latest Last Week Tonight, John Oliver took a deep dive on JD Vance, the former Hillbilly Elegy memoirist turned US senator from Ohio and Donald Trump’s second-term vice-president. “I know to some, Vance might appear to be just another abrasive Maga asshole with a load-bearing beard,” Oliver duly noted. “But to many on the right, he’s a towering intellect.”
Tucker Carlson once called him “the smartest and deepest [senator] I’ve ever met”, which is “kind of like Ryan Lochte calling Cookie Monster his go-to guy for investment advice”, said Oliver. “I don’t trust any of the individuals involved on any of the subjects involved.”
Vance has also performed one of the most confounding about-faces in modern politics. As recently as 2016, when he was doing press rounds for Hillbilly Elegy, he said that if Trump stood a good chance of winning, he would “hold my nose” and vote for Hillary Clinton, because Trump would become “America’s Hitler”. Just a few years later, he was campaigning for the Senate in Ohio alongside him.
