Dreams of My Mamaw

By Jonah Goldberg

Friday, June 19, 2026

 

When I saw the phrase “Hillbilly Obama” getting picked up I was worried that someone had beaten me to the punch.

 

Before I explain that, let’s explain what people mean by Hillbilly Obama.

 

Ben Domenech coined the phrase. “At some point, this Republican Party needs to decide which kind of foreign policy it’s gonna have,” he said on Special Report with Bret Baier this week. “Is it going to be an ‘America First’ foreign policy, one that is bold, that uses American power in key moments decisively in order to affect what it wants to achieve? Or are we going to just backslide into being some kind of ‘Hillbilly Obama’ kind of GOP?”

 

Domenech used the phrase to do two things. First, to describe Donald Trump’s 180 on Iran. Second, to add to the chorus assigning blame or credit for the new 14 Points at Versailles.

 

I don’t really buy that Vice President J.D. Vance is the architect of this “peace.” And even if he deserves outsize credit for convincing Trump to reverse himself, that doesn’t absolve Trump. He’s the president. It was Trump’s decision. The blame-the-bad-boyar argument just doesn’t fly with me, as I discussed earlier this week.

 

But what is clear is that Vance wants the ball. Nick Catoggio called it Wednesday night, and Thursday morning we had confirmation from Vance’s own camp. “Without question, the biggest potential political liability Vance had was the unpopularity of the war in Iran,” someone from Vanceland told Politico’s Dasha Burns. “So it’s fascinating to watch his biggest enemies in the GOP unwittingly inoculate him from that liability by branding him as responsible for the peace deal.”

 

“He now gets to do a media tour defending the president — AKA the kingmaker of our party — from their idiotic criticism of the deal,” the Vance surrogate said. “While even his critics would acknowledge that the vice president is a smart guy, sometimes what really matters in politics is how stupid your enemies are.”

 

I don’t think this analysis is ridiculous, save for one problem: The criticisms of the deal aren’t “idiotic,” and Vance’s “enemies” aren’t stupid.

 

Indeed not every critic of the deal was an enemy of Vance, but the vice president's supporters decided to make it clear they think critics of the deal aren’t just wrong, but stupid and Vance’s foes.

 

Now, the criticisms might be wrong—I don’t think they are, depending which criticisms we’re talking about—and even if they’re right, they may not be proven right on a timetable that hurts Vance. For example, there’s no way Iran builds its own nuclear weapon in the next couple years, but that doesn’t mean this fiasco won’t make it more likely it gets a nuke on some future president’s watch, proving the critics right.

 

But the idea that all of the criticisms of this deal are “idiotic” is really quite stupid. Name a foreign policy expert who is not either on the White House payroll, or auditioning to be, who thinks this is brilliant and flawless. I’m sure there’s someone. But are Walter Russell Mead, Niall Ferguson, Ray Takeyh, Bret Stephens, Benny Morris, Trey Gowdy, Jack Keane, Elliott Abrams, nearly everyone at National Review, Commentary, The Dispatch, the American Enterprise Institute, the Hudson Institute, and the Foundation for Defense of Democracies idiots? Not everyone has the same criticisms. Some are nuanced, some strident. Some are of the “wait and see” variety. But as far as I can tell, none are idiotic.

 

But this is how Vance sees politics. Despite zigzagging all over the ideological map in his very short political career, he’s always sure that he’s right where he lands at the moment and that people who disagree with him are either buffoons or liars serving their own selfish interests (or Israel’s) at the expense of the common good and real—sorry, “heritage”—Americans.

 

The Hillbilly Obama line works to describe Vance’s approach because it is eerily similar to not just the substance of President Barack Obama’s defense of the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) but also the way he argued for it.

 

On the substance, the idea of the JCPOA was basically a mix of expediency and hope. The idea was to delay any possible nuclear weapon long enough that if Iran ever got one, it would be some other president’s problem. That was the expediency. The hope was that the delay might buy time for Iran to moderate and mature to the point where the regime would recognize the folly of having a bomb. Provide enough carrots and it will abandon its pursuit of a nuclear stick. We can trust Iran’s promise not to pursue a bomb until the promise is no longer necessary.

 

Here’s how Obama put it: “My hope is that building on this deal we can continue to have conversations with Iran that incentivize them to behave differently in the region, to be less aggressive, less hostile, more cooperative, to operate the way we expect nations in the international community to behave.” And: “Do I hope that by virtue of Iran having greater commercial interactions with the world and students’ exchanges taking place and perhaps a generation of Iranian leadership changing, do I hope that the character of the regime changes? Absolutely. But I’m not counting on it.”

 

This is the exact argument Vance is making. The $300 billion reconstruction fund will incentivize the Iranians to see the folly of having a bomb and being an exporter of terror. They will moderate into normal members of the community of nations, and ultimately, join the Abraham Accords.

 

And Vance is defending the Trump administration’s deal with the same Obamaesque rhetorical flourishes. Opponents of the deal only want war. They have no other alternative, and there is no other alternative. Critics are being led by the nose by Bibi Netanyahu or by, wink-wink, neocons. It’s strawmen and accusations of bad faith all the way down.

 

I can provide quotes aplenty, but I should get to my point.

 

Hillbilly Obama all the way down.

 

Obama and Vance are different people in all sorts of important ways. But the similarities are striking. Both men were abandoned by a parent or parents and had troubled childhoods. Both went to elite law schools. Both wrote very successful memoirs before they accomplished much of substance and parlayed their literary fame into political careers. Both harbor profound grievances about the country that made them rich, famous, and powerful.

 

If you think this is far-fetched, don’t take my word for it. J.D. Vance agrees. In 2017, Vance wrote a column for the New York Times explaining how when he was young, he saw a lot of himself in Bill Clinton because Clinton had a childhood similar to his own. He wrote:

 

I often wonder how many kids look at our current president the way I once looked at President Clinton. Barack Obama was elected during my second year of college, and save for his skin color, he had much in common with Bill Clinton: Despite an unstable life with a single mother, aided by two loving grandparents, he had made in his adulthood a family life that seemed to embody my sense of the American ideal.

 

A bit further on he adds:

 

Eventually, I achieved something roughly similar to the president’s early, personal accomplishments: a prestigious law degree, a strong professional career and a modicum of fame as a writer.

 

We should pause here for a moment to appreciate something remarkable about our country. Two out of the last five presidents, as well as the current vice president, had rocky, dysfunctional childhoods, and yet they rose to the top of our system.

 

Both Vance and Obama’s rise began by leveraging their literary tales of abandonment into being welcomed into the highest echelons of our politics. They both arrived at elite law schools as outsiders and left with the confidence of insiders and the skill to market themselves as professional outsiders. They carved out a beat as representatives of racially aggrieved demographics. Obviously, there are differences. In Hillbilly Elegy Vance criticizes his people for blaming their plight on others. Their problems “were not created by governments or corporations,” he wrote. “We created them.” He added: “Public policy can help, but there is no government that can fix these problems for us.” Obama did little of that in Dreams From My Father. He mostly leaned into and amplified the racial resentments of minorities.

 

To Obama’s credit, however, as president he moved closer to the hard truths and tough love approach. He gave a strong speech at the NAACP in 2009, telling black parents and children that whatever the unfairness of the system, they have “no excuse” to let that control their lives and actions. At Morehouse College in 2013, Obama said, “I have to say, growing up, I made quite a few [excuses] myself. Sometimes I wrote off my own failings as just another example of the world trying to keep a black man down. I had a tendency sometimes to make excuses for me not doing the right thing. But one of the things that all of you have learned over the last four years is there’s no longer any room for excuses.”

 

Vance has gone the other direction, leaning into resentment and grievance as corporations, elites, and Democrats keep his people down. “America’s ruling class wrote the checks. Communities like mine paid the price,” he proclaimed in his vice presidential nomination acceptance speech.

 

What is remarkable to me is how completely Vance has become a right-wing version of a left-wing identitarian ideologue. When Ross Douthat asked Vance about the un-Christian tone of this administration, Vance fell back on a classically left-wing critique of “tone policing.” “I also think that tonal arguments are ways of, frankly, policing working-class ways of communication and covering them in elite preferences.” As Erick Erickson noted, “This is sort of like how progressives defend various destructive behaviors in various minority communities – ‘it’s just their culture, and we have to respect it.’”

 

The way I read Vance’s argument, it was not just in defense of the crude, ugly, and bigoted rhetoric out of this administration, or the crude, ugly, and bigoted rhetoric used to defend this administration, but of the crude, ugly, and bigoted rhetoric when deployed by “his” people in general. This is particularly gross when you realize he was making this case in the context of a book about his embrace of Christianity, which has a lot to say about “guarding your tongue.”

 

It’s even harder to take when you grasp just how much Vance lies and distorts the views and motives of the people he disagrees with. When the Trump campaign demonized poor, black, legal, Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio—“they’re eating the dogs, they’re eating the cats”—Vance didn’t apologize for it, he boasted that we’re “creating a story.”

 

As Kevin Williamson wrote from Springfield at the time:

 

Vance has turned Solzhenitsyn’s maxim on its head: “Let the lie come into the world, but only through me, and only if I get something good out of it.” A man who is not suffering from whatever disease of the soul with which Vance is afflicted would have a hard time even imagining wanting to be vice president—of all petty things!—that bad. A different and better sort of man would understand that bearing false witness against 15,000 poor and vulnerable people in the pursuit of political power is the same as bearing false witness against anybody else.

 

This week, Vance has casually lied and distorted the views of his critics, in America and Israel, purely out of political ambition. Critics want the war to continue “until every bomb has been dropped or until every Iranian is dead.” He falsely claimed that members of the Israeli Cabinet attacked Trump personally, and threatened that doing so risks losing America as an ally. But there were no such personal attacks. He lied about what the memorandum of understanding said, insinuating that those who relied on accurate reports were spreading “Iranian propaganda.” When the reports were revealed to be accurate, he said, “Words don’t matter, ladies and gentlemen.” Trump has the highest IQ of any president, we haven’t privileged white South African refugees over all others, Trump didn’t say he loves inflation: On and on it went.

 

But it’s all fine, because whatever Vance says in service to his ambition is self-justifying, and anyone who disagrees is an idiot or acting in bad faith. That’s the lesson Vance has taken from his meteoric rise through the meritocracy. And why not? Who can dispute it’s worked for him so far.