‘The tragedy of Trump’s candidacy is that, embedded in his furious exhortations against Muslims and Mexicans and trade deals gone awry is a message that America’s white poor don’t need: that everything wrong in your life is someone else’s fault.”

That was JD Vance, Donald Trump’s pick for vice-president, writing on the eve of the 2016 presidential election about the man who is now his boss. Trump, Vance wrote in another essay, serves up “cultural heroin”, his promises “the needle in America’s collective vein”, providing an “easy escape from the pain”. Voters would eventually have to “trade the quick high of ‘Make America Great Again’ for real medicine”.

It is Vance, though, who has made the trade, and in the opposite direction. Two years ago, battling to be Ohio’s Republican candidate for the Senate, he realised the need for Trump’s endorsement, so backtracked, “regretting” his earlier criticisms.

Trump, in turn, recognises in Vance a useful asset in cementing working-class support. Vance may be an Ivy League-educated lawyer and venture capitalist, and a politician heavily backed by Silicon Valley billionaires, but he grew up in the decaying steel town of Middletown, Ohio, the descendant of hillbillies who had migrated in search of jobs. Raised in poverty and within a dysfunctional family, Vance escaped by joining the marines, before studying law at Yale University, giving him entry into the highest echelons of American society.

An elite voice who understood the realities of working-class life, Vance became, for mainstream commentators, one of “us” who could speak about “them”, a guide to what many consider a mysterious species: poor white people living precarious lives.

In his memoir, Hillbilly........

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