I still can’t comprehend that he still has a career as a “populist” Republican after Hillbilly Elegy. People forget that the entire point of that book was that he was trying to start his political career by appealling to right-wing Liberals and the point was “look how backwards these people are and how they brought the economic suffering on themselves with opiates and racism” and he was trying to tell liberals that they don’t need to appeal to or feel bad for people in Appalachia or the Rust Belt.