image: the washington examiner
There’s something eerie about watching J.D. Vance on the national stage.
He has the ingredients. A working-class origin story with cinematic grit. A Yale law degree to back it. Tech-adjacent funding and Peter Thiel’s endorsement. He’s fluent in both the language of the forgotten American and the rarified air of elite institutions. He should be the perfect avatar of a post-Trump realignment.
And yet… it all feels underpowered.
Not intellectually. Not strategically. But narratively.
Because for all the rage and realignment, the modern Right lacks what every lasting political movement eventually cultivates:
A mythmaker.
A storyteller
A disciplined engine for narrative war.
Reagan had Hollywood
Obama had Silicon Valley.
The Left today has Netflix, academia, and every microphone in between.
Trump had Twitter and chaos - but it was never cohesive.
J.D. Vance has none of that. Or rather, he hasn’t yet found his equivalent of the wartime propagandist. Not in the cheap sense of spin. In the deeper, older sense of myth-construction.
He doesn’t need a Goebbels - he needs a Tolkien.
This is not about lies. It’s about narrative discipline - the ability to distill a messy coalition into a legible, contagious story. It’s what turns ideology into identity.
If you control the story, you don’t need to win the argument.
Narrative power isn’t about Left or Right - it’s about infrastructure.
The Left has built it through media, universities, and Hollywood. The Right, historically more skeptical of centralized culture, has relied on individual voices - but it’s never built a system that can outlast a moment.
What Vance - and this whole realignment - needs is not more tweets. It needs narrative infrastructure that can make a worldview contagious, legible, and lasting.
J.D Vance, to succeed, needs a myth that sticks, and evidently I don’t believe he has one yet.
“Hillbilly Elegy” is a deeply personal memoir, but it focuses more on Vance’s early life - not his transformation into a national political figure. It’s about survival, not triumph. He ends the book at the gates of success, not in the halls of power. What’s missing is the mythic arc - the hero who not only escapes the past, but builds something new in its place.
The Right has plenty of messengers - Karoline Leavitt, Stephen Miller, even Tucker Carlson in his own way - but very few architects of myth. These figures can channel energy, even shape mood, but they don’t build enduring narrative infrastructure. They react. They punch.
But they don’t encode meaning in a way that turns into lasting institutions, symbols, or belief systems.
While J.D is a talented writer, I believe an author like of , with his precise, analytical style, might be uniquely positioned to help craft the narrative around Vance. Because right now, that layer doesn’t exist.
Mario’s craft is incredibly impressive to me, as he has a thorough, truthful analysis of a subject.
Having read all of The Lord of the Rings, I cannot say there’ll be another Tolkien. Or, at least, I am unfamiliar with said person.
Trumplkien
If there anyone that is close to Tolkien’s level of myth-making, it would be Donald Trump. Trump is incredible at building a narrative. Quite literally a 10/10 narrative builder, and I don’t care what anyone says, no one can take that away from him.
Trump has turned grievance into gospel, rallies into ritual, and a border wall into a national totem. No consultant or comms team could’ve scripted that. It was pure, primal narrative instinct.
But instinct alone doesn’t build civilizations.
It sparks movements, not myths. It electrifies the now, but it doesn’t echo forward.
The future belongs to those who can turn raw energy into architecture - to builders of end of enduring narrative infrastructure. The kind that doesn’t just go viral, but becomes foundational. The kind that encodes meaning across generations, like scripture, like legend, like law.
J.D. Vance has the origin story. He has the intellect. He even has the moment.
But what he lacks - and what this entire post-Trump realignment still lacks - is the Tolkien-class mythmaker who can transform populism into permanence.
That seat is still open.
And the future will belong to whoever builds the operating system for belief - not just for the Right, but for the civilization that replaces the one now breaking.