Terry Prone: JD Vance left poverty behind — and promptly betrayed everything he once held dear

Journalists and sociologists tried to make sense of the Trump phenomenon but none came as close to understanding the rage of poor white people as the author of 'Hillbilly Elegy'

JD Vance climbed out of an appallingly challenging childhood and kicked it away as a rung in his ladder and cosied up to Donald Trump, who he had previously dismissed as a ‘moron’. Picture: Drew Angerer/Getty

His single mother was a drug addict, so he spent a lot of his childhood with his grandparents, which sounds idyllic, except that this couple weren’t exactly God’s gift to grandparenting. The old man was a violent alcoholic and ‘Mamaw’, the granny, did violence without even needing alcohol. And we’re not talking about the odd defensive thump.

This grandmother watched her drunken husband passed out in the house and considered her options before dousing him with petrol and setting fire to him. He lived but, for the grandson, this bizarre horror was just one more inexplicable act in a chaotic Appalachian childhood that broke all the rules.