U.S. Vice President JD Vance earlier this month. In his own telling, Trump's anti-establishment provocations, which previously had alarmed Vance, were what ultimately won him over. Credit: Kylie Cooper/ReutersJD Vance's new memoir tells the story of his conversion to Catholicism, Trumpism and economic populism. But as an attempt by the vice president and MAGA heir apparent to give the post-Trump right a coherent ideology, it notably lacks convictionRoughly a decade ago, JD Vance, then a 31-year-old lawyer and investor, catapulted from near-obscurity to celebrity when his memoir, "Hillbilly Elegy," became a national bestseller. The book charts the young Vance's rise out of Appalachian poverty to the apex of the American meritocracy: from a broken family in southern Ohio, his single mother addicted to painkillers and alcohol, through a stint as a press officer with the U.S. Marines in Iraq, to college at Ohio State University, and then on to Yale Law School, where he learned the ways of the liberal elite which he would later scorn.