America celebrated 250 years of independence this weekend. The Atlantic celebrated 2016. The magazine republished JD Vance’s decade-old “Never Trump” essay as if it had stumbled onto some forgotten political bombshell. Calm down, Atlantic. We’ve all lived through the last ten years.
Ten years ago today, J. D. Vance called Trump “cultural heroin” in The Atlantic: “To every complex problem, he promises a simple solution … He never offers details for how these plans will work, because he can’t,” Vance wrote of Trump.
Read the piece: https://t.co/RgEhVdJBZx
— The Atlantic (@TheAtlantic) July 4, 2026
Ten years is an eternity in politics. Presidents have come and gone, rivals have become allies, campaign opponents have joined Cabinet meetings, and millions of Americans, including JD Vance, have changed their minds. Yet The Atlantic apparently believes the most revealing thing about America’s vice president is something he wrote before Donald Trump had governed a single day and before Vance had ever held elected office.
Because no trip back to 2016 would be complete without a tour guide, The Atlantic opens the republished essay with a new editor’s note explaining why readers should revisit Vance’s decade-old critique of Donald Trump.
Editor’s Note: This essay originally ran in 2016, shortly after its author published his memoir, Hillbilly Elegy. We are republishing it on the occasion of its tenth anniversary, so that our readers can judge for themselves how well his assessment of the man he now serves as vice president has stood the test of time.
The Atlantic says readers should decide whether Vance’s assessment “stood the test of time.”
I’d say the American people already rendered their verdict.
The editor’s note practically nudges readers toward one question: If Vance believed all of this in 2016, what should they make of the fact that he now serves as Trump’s vice president?
That’s called evidence.
The man who wrote that essay now works in the Oval Office alongside the man he once criticized. Trump knew exactly what Vance had written. Vance never hid it. Republican voters knew it too.
Here’s what I kept coming back to: What exactly is the story here?
The more I thought about it, the more I realized The Atlantic had accidentally made the opposite point. The magazine wanted readers to revisit a decade-old political disagreement. Instead, it reminded me how little that disagreement seems to matter to the people who actually have to govern.
Take Marco Rubio.
If you somehow missed the 2016 Republican primary, those two weren’t exactly exchanging Christmas cards. Trump had “Little Marco.” Rubio questioned whether Trump was fit for the presidency. It was ugly. Fast-forward ten years, and Rubio is serving in Trump’s Cabinet.
Then there’s Robert F. Kennedy Jr. He wasn’t a MAGA original. Neither was Tulsi Gabbard. Trump still brought them into his administration.
That’s what made The Atlantic’s little trip down memory lane so odd to me.
Maybe that’s the bigger story. Trump apparently saw something in Rubio, Kennedy, Gabbard, and Vance that mattered more than what they said about him years earlier.
Maybe that’s the part I find most interesting.
A lot of Americans didn’t make up their minds about Donald Trump in 2016. They made them up after watching him govern. I had plenty of questions about Trump in 2016. Then he actually became president, and I started judging him by what he did instead of what everyone predicted he would do.
That’s how elections are supposed to work. Candidates make promises. Presidents leave records.
By the time JD Vance joined the Republican ticket, voters weren’t choosing between campaign slogans anymore. They had already lived through one Trump presidency. They’d also lived through four years of Joe Biden. They had something far better than predictions. They had experience.
On the very weekend The Atlantic was inviting readers to revisit the words of JD Vance, the venture capitalist, America was listening to JD Vance, the vice president, commemorate the nation’s 250th birthday. Those are two very different snapshots of the same man, separated by a decade of public life.
Watching Vance’s July 4 speech after rereading his 2016 essay was a reminder that a lot can happen in ten years. One came from a private citizen. The other came from the vice president of the United States.
Maybe I’m giving The Atlantic too much credit. Maybe there wasn’t a deeper message at all. Maybe someone simply wandered into the archives, found a ten-year-old article, and decided to give it another lap around the track. Either way, America has had ten years to judge Donald Trump, JD Vance, and everything that came after. I don’t need a magazine to send me back to 2016 to tell me what I already know.
Feature Image: Gage Skidmore from Surprise, AZ, United States of America, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Cameron says: When Obama won, I was disappointed but said to myself “Give him a chance to see what he does.”
When Trump won the first time, I was disappointed but said to myself “Give him a chance to see what he does.”
Obama was a disappointment, Trump was not.
1 Comment