OUCH

JD Vance Humiliated as He’s Savaged by Early Book Reviews

The VP’s faith memoir debuted this week with not-so-impressive reviews.

Vice President JD Vance has already been hit with a flurry of damning reviews for his new book.

Communion, touted as a spiritual memoir, has been savaged by both the Wall Street Journal and The Cut, with the latter being particularly unimpressed by Vance’s telling of his home life and his conversion to Catholicism in his mid-30s.

“I got a colonoscopy on Friday,” writes Ginny Hogan for The Cut. “If only that were the least pleasant experience of my last week. But no, that would be when I pulled an all-nighter on Monday reading Communion.”

Hogan has a litany of issues with Communion, which totals 304 pages and was promoted by Vance in a messy media blitz this week. Namely, she could not believe “how much he could say about Usha without saying anything at all,” referring to the second lady.

“Vance came to fame on his writing talent, and all he could muster to describe his wife of 12 years were ‘beauty’ and ‘intelligence.’ JD, ask ChatGPT for some synonyms! Be romantic!”

She continued, “He also writes at length about his endless curiosity toward the Second Lady before admitting he didn’t know she speaks German until they literally took a trip to Germany together.”

Hogan writes that Vance appeared desperate to portray Usha as being as happy in their marriage and place in American politics as he is.

“If the book has one goal, it’s to get ahead of the rumors that he ruined Usha’s life (as if ruining your wife’s life isn’t basically a prerequisite to becoming a world leader),” Hogan writes. “Vance badly wants the reader to know that Usha is totally fine with her choices—namely, quitting her high-powered law job because of his career—because she was never that ambitious to begin with.”

Hogan continued, “In his exact words, she has ‘the biggest mismatch between ambition and ability of any person I’ve ever met.’ He adds that while in law school, her dream job was creating educational programming for kids, which is (a) why most people go to Yale Law School, obviously, and (b) suspiciously close to what she does as second lady.”

Vance, 41, also made it clear that Usha, 40, was happy to move to Ohio, loved his conversion to Catholicism at 35, and said that she is the one who wanted another baby after previously saying she did not.

Issues with the book—which has a rating of 1.27 stars out of five on Goodreads thus far—go beyond Usha, however. Hogan writes that “Vance’s hypocrisy alone makes Communion nearly unreadable.”

“You don’t need me to tell you this, but he is not a good Catholic,” Hogan writes. “A good Catholic would never support Trump’s hateful immigration policies, cruel Medicaid cuts, hatred toward trans children, and unnecessary foreign wars.”

She adds, “The first half of his book would be a reasonable critique of American hustle culture, of the pursuit of prestige and external validation above all else, if it came from a different author. But I’ve never encountered anyone thirstier for external validation than Vance.”

This hypocrisy, including his flip-flopping to go from saying President Donald Trump may be “America’s Hitler” to now being his No. 1 defender, was also not lost upon Journal columnist Barton Swaim, who wrote that the book suffers from “egregious sloppiness.”

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Hypocrisy was present within Communion itself, according to Swaim.

Vance writes in the second chapter that economic policies like minimum-wage laws are more complex than they appear and warrant humility. By the book’s 11th chapter, Swaim writes that the VP abandons that nuance to attack free-market economics using oversimplified caricatures.

Other portions—like taking away the wrong point from a paper about parental leave—left Swaim stunned and questioning where things went wrong for Vance in his second book, which was published a decade after his first, Hillbilly Elegy, was a best-seller that was adapted into a movie.

“Whether Mr. Vance’s error arose from laziness or dishonesty or something else, I don’t know, but alas it typifies the low regard he has for people who profess views he dislikes,” he said.

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Josh FialloBreaking News Reporter

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