John Oliver on JD Vance: ‘He’s become the archetype of the hyper-online conservative troll’

On the latest Last Week Tonight, John Oliver took a deep dive on JD Vance, the former Hillbilly Elegy memoirist turned US senator from Ohio and Donald Trump’s second-term vice-president. “I know to some, Vance might appear to be just another abrasive Maga asshole with a lode-bearing beard,” Oliver duly noted. “But to many on the right, he’s a towering intellect.”

Tucker Carlson once called him “the smartest and deepest [senator] I’ve ever met”, which is “kind of like Ryan Lochte calling Cookie Monster his go-to guy for investment advice”, said Oliver. “I don’t trust any of the individuals involved on any of the subjects involved.”

Vance has also performed one of the most confounding about-faces in modern politics. As recently as 2016, when he was doing press rounds for Hillbilly Elegy, he said that if Trump stood a good chance of winning, he would “hold my nose” and vote for Hillary Clinton, because Trump would become “America’s Hitler”. Just a few years later, he was campaigning for the Senate in Ohio alongside him.

And “Vance has turned out to be perfect for Trump, as in many ways he’s become like a son Trump doesn’t even have to pretend to love,” Oliver quipped. The 41-year-old has served as a dutiful “attack dog” for the president, defending the president’s decisions with barely passable rationalizations.

“Now obviously some of that is just being vice-president – you have to roll over for your boss,” Oliver said. “But it’s worth remembering: Vance has an inside track to the Oval Office in the future, not only because polls show him leading the Republican field for 2028, but also because if this guy doesn’t make it through his term, either because the 25th amendment got invoked or his internal organs decided ‘you know what, dude, you can’t keep doing this to us, we’re out,’ JD Vance will become president.”

Given that, Oliver dug into Vance’s current ideology and status as a prominent rightwing troll. But first, he returned to 10-year-old clips of Vance, expressing somewhat complicated and grounded views on the white working class and the impulse to scapegoat others for political expediency. “It is strange to see such a nuanced tone from a guy who has since become such a troll,” Oliver observed. “It would be like finding old videos of your dog eating with a fork and knife. What the fuck?! Yesterday, I watched you take a shit and then eat it mouth-first. How on earth did we get from this to that?”

“I wish I could tell you what happened to him between 2016 and that moment, but sadly I am not a mind reader nor the therapist he so desperately needs,” he continued. “Vance would tell you it’s that Trump turned out to be a great president in his first term. Others would say that he’s a power-hungry ladder-climber who saw that the Maga right was the only way up.

“But I’d argue his shift was both opportunistic and genuine. Because Vance has seemed to have journeyed farther and farther into some pretty far-right thought.” In 2024, Vance himself said he was “plugged into a lot of weird rightwing subcultures”, guided by his mentor and patron, billionaire PayPal founder Peter Thiel – “which isn’t something you want to hear from your Tinder date, let alone the fucking vice-president”, Olive fumed. “In fact, in many ways, he’s become the archetype of the hyper-online conservative troll, right down to the whole kidding/not kidding, trigger the libs shtick.”

As an example, Oliver pointed to Vance’s role in spreading lies about Haitian immigrants eating cats and dogs in Springfield, Ohio; when asked by CNN’s Kaitlan Collins about the baseless rumor, Vance insisted that the claim deserved attention, and only got some because Republicans turned it into “a meme about cats”.

“You didn’t turn it into a meme about cats,” Oliver responded. “You shared misinformation that turned a whole town upside down. And it wasn’t even the fun kind of misinformation, like when that same summer, everyone got convinced that Vance had fucked a couch, a theory that went so viral it led to us calling Vance’s team and asking: ‘Has the senator ever had sex with a couch?’ To which, by the way, they hung up on us.”

He added that the show followed up via email with the same question, along with several additional follow-ups on whether Vance had ever had sex “with a latex glove stuffed between two couch cushions” or “any other furniture or household items”.

“So far, they still haven’t responded to us, which isn’t exactly a resounding ‘no’, is it?” he added. “And it’s not like it’s hard to deny you fucked a couch. If you email [email protected] and ask if I’ve fucked one, I promise you’ll be emailed right back with an answer of: ‘No way.’”

“That exchange is basically JD Vance in a nutshell,” Oliver added. “He told a racist lie he saw on social media, doubled down, then tried to play the ‘you elites don’t get it’ card to huff his way out of the whole thing.”

As for where Vance’s beliefs have ended up, the result is, according to Oliver, “pretty grim”. The vice-president has inaccurately blamed numerous societal issues, such as healthcare costs and home prices, on undocumented immigrants and expressed nakedly racist views. (“It is totally reasonable and acceptable for American citizens to look at their next-door neighbors and say: ‘I want to live next to people that I have things in common with,” Vance said on a radio show.) And he remains obsessed with women having children, even going so far as to say that childless women are more “sociopathic” and that “the rejection of the American family” is “the most pernicious and evil thing the left has done”.

That is, at least in part, “who Vance is, and I’d argue it’s repellant”, said Oliver. “But the dangerous thing is he’s proven himself able to hide the worst part of himself at moments when the most people are watching him.” Oliver pointed to the 2024 vice-presidential debate, in which Vance appeared polished and reasonable, to the surprise of many Democrats.

“If he can put that act back on when everyone is looking, we may be in trouble,” Oliver noted. “All of which is why it is so important to remember who JD Vance actually is. Because he’ll present himself as an anti-elitist man of the people, but much of his career has been bankrolled by tech billionaires” such as Thiel. “He’ll offer empathy and understanding when it comes to ‘non-conventional’ thinkers, but he’ll deride immigrants as a net-negative on society, and it’s not hard to see what the differences between those two groups are.”

“I know Vance is easy to write off as a charisma-less asshole,” he concluded, “but scratch even one inch under the surface – peel back the beard – and you’ll find something far worse: his batshit views, and his bare fucking face.”