As JD Vance dutifully shared clips on social media of Donald Trump delivering his Fourth of July speech on Saturday, an essay he penned 10 years earlier trashing the president he now serves went viral.
“Trump is cultural heroin. He makes some feel better for a bit. But he cannot fix what ails them, and one day they’ll realize it,” Vance wrote, as he spent 1,300 words comparing Trump to hard drugs and easy highs.
He went on say Trump “exploits” real problems facing voters and makes promises that will never be fulfilled, describing it as a “great tragedy.”
“During this election season, it appears that many Americans have reached for a new pain reliever. It too, promises a quick escape from life’s cares, an easy solution to the mounting social problems of U.S. communities and culture,” Vance wrote of his now-boss’s cultural grip.
“It demands nothing and requires little more than a modest presence and maybe a few enablers. It enters minds, not through lungs or veins, but through eyes and ears, and its name is Donald Trump.”
When he became Trump’s vice presidential hopeful in 2024, no doubt Vance was glad for Trump’s reputation as not a big reader.
Trump has struggled in interviews over the years to name books he is reading, or to quote from the book he now says is his favorite: the Bible.
But the piece has gone viral on its 10-year anniversary, after The Atlantic republished it to allow readers to judge for themselves if Vance had correctly assessed Trump the first time.
“Congratulations to @JDVance on having the most popular article currently in the Atlantic! That’s huge,” one X user wrote after discovering the piece.
“We all slept in a bit after that remarkable, uh, whatever it was in DC last night, but pleased to tell you that @JDVance is still holding the top spot of most-popular articles on @TheAtlantic site today,” wrote Atlantic writer Tom Nichols.
Awkward.
Appearing at the top of The Atlantic’s ‘Popular’ list, ‘Opioid of the Masses’, as the piece is titled, has recaptured the nation’s attention as Trump enters the second half of his second term, less popular than ever before.
Considered through Vance’s 2016 lens—that Trump is a populist who claims to have the answers to a huge range of problems but doesn’t actually have the policy plans to back up his rhetoric—Trump’s waning popularity becomes inevitable.
When the high wears off, all that’s left is the come down.
The Daily Beast reached out to the vice president and the White House for comment, but did not receive an immediate response.
