At the Turning Point USA conference at the University of Mississippi in October, an audience member asked Vice President JD Vance about the tension between his interracial, interfaith marriage with Usha, the daughter of Indian immigrants, and his beliefs that the U.S. should reduce the number of immigrants. He began with his thoughts on immigration policy, then veered toward the personal by saying he hopes Usha converts to Catholicism. “Do I hope eventually that she is somehow moved by the same thing that I was moved by in church? I honestly do wish that because I believe in the Christian Gospel, and I hope eventually my wife comes to see it the same way,” he said.

It wasn’t the most grotesque statement Vance has made—there are plenty of contenders for that—but it exposed his twisted priorities. Here was the vice president defending the administration’s vile immigration policies in a way that fundamentally degrades the experiences and traditions of his own family, of people he is bound by vows—vows that should be sacred to a Christian—to love and protect. It sums up Vance’s journey into public life and politics: There is nobody he won’t betray, and no principle he won’t cast aside, in his quest to accrue more fame and power.

This has been clear since he rose to fame. Vance grew up in Middletown, Ohio, a suburb between Cincinnati and Dayton. In his memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, Vance describes the hardships of his childhood there—his mother’s addictions, his absent father, his feuding grandparents—which he left by joining the Army and later going to college. His grandparents were from the Appalachians in Eastern Kentucky and had moved there for factory work, like so many other transplants looking for work in the middle of the last century. Because of that history, Vance claimed a kind of hillbilly mantel. “We called our hometown of Middletown Middletucky because so many of the residents actually came from Kentucky,” he said on Fresh Air in 2016. “So it was this massive transplantation of one culture and one group of people into an........

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