JD Vance

 Thomas B. Edsall, NY Times -  Whenever Vice President JD Vance takes the microphone, he has to decide which combination of his multiple identities to select for the specific audience before him, a choice he sometimes seems to find bewildering.

The range of Vance’s mix-and-match choices includes hillbilly, intellectual, Trump successor, raging MAGA loyalist and high-tech investor, not to mention veteran threatening other countries and veteran no-long-wars guy.

Vance’s difficulty finding well-being, much less genuineness, raises basic questions about his expected presidential campaign.

Is he, for example, a trustworthy heir to the Trump mantle or are his real feelings reflected in his 2016 comment to a friend: “I go back and forth between thinking Trump is a cynical asshole like Nixon who wouldn’t be that bad (and might even prove useful) or that he’s America’s Hitler.”

Vance’s problem is his failure to find comfort in any combination of identities so that he comes across as inauthentic, cross-pressured, forced — even counterfeit.

“Vance may be a standout when it comes to personal reinvention,” Ryan Enos, a political scientist at Harvard, wrote by email responding to my query, “perhaps partially because it has happened so rapidly and in the social media era.