The Atlantic republishes JD Vance’s anti-Trump essay from 10 years ago

Magazine invites readers to judge Vance’s ‘assessment’ of Trump, whom he called ‘cultural heroin’ during first term The Atlantic on Saturday republished a JD Vance essay that dismissed Donald Trump as “cultural heroin” exactly 10 years earlier, bringing back to the fore his evolving from a critic of the president to his vice-president. In an editor’s note, the magazine said it was republishing the essay on the occasion of its 10th anniversary – and the US’s semiquincentennial – “so that our readers can judge for themselves how well his assessment [of Trump] … has stood the test of time”. The original essay was published during Trump’s first victorious presidential run, when Mike Pence was his running mate and before Vance entered politics. He worked at Mithril Capital Management, Peter Thiel’s venture capital firm, at the time and had just published Hillbilly Elegy, a bestselling memoir of his upbringing in the Rust belt that also served as a social commentary on the white working class. In the essay, Vance said many Americans turned to Trump as a “pain reliever” in the midst of a social crisis in which mounting distrust in the government and eco