German publishing house Ullstein has decided not to reprint J.D. Vance’s book Hillbilly Elegy since its author became Donald Trump’s nominee for Vice President. Demand for the book has skyrocketed after Vance was nominated, making the decision bad for business and freedom of expression.
The 39-year-old senator from Ohio wrote his bestselling memoir in 2016, telling his story of growing up poor in southern Ohio, having a drug-addicted mother, and being raised by his strict grandparents.
A stern critic of ‘the Donald’ back in 2016, he later praised Trump’s presidency, telling The New York Times: “I allowed myself to focus so much on the stylistic element of Trump that I completely ignored the way in which he substantively was offering something very different on foreign policy, on trade, on immigration.”
What led publisher Ullstein to turn away a potential cash cow? They could tolerate him when he was hostile to Trump (and, allegedly, to the Ohio community of his childhood), but not any more.
On social issues, Vance is strongly conservative: he opposes illegal immigration, abortion, same-sex marriage, and gun control, and has proposed banning transgender healthcare for minors. He opposes American military aid to Ukraine.
On migration, he told The European Conservative in an interview in February:
We have a terrible migration crisis in the United States. Probably ten percent of our population is illegal aliens, and another 15 percent are in an irregular situation with the law, in one form or another. It takes a lot of work to assimilate such a large number of people into your society, and to do it carefully, to ensure that it doesn’t disrupt health services, education services, and so forth. Not to mention the amount of human trafficking, drug trafficking, and sex trafficking that happens because of the American southern border with Mexico.
On his criticism of military aid to Ukraine he said:
I certainly feel like I’m in a hostile territory, I think there is a very broad consensus that the West should be funnelling as many resources and weapons as possible. And I feel like I’m the only guy sort of shouting in the wilderness saying, ‘What’s the strategy here? What’s the endgame? How do you get out of this conflict without completely destroying the country of Ukraine—demographically, infrastructurally, economically?’
These opinions were too much for the German publishing house Ullstein, which said that, at the time of publication, Hillbilly Elegy had offered an authentic portrayal of growing up in the impoverished white working class, and Vance had also distanced himself from Donald Trump. Now, a spokeswoman told Der Spiegel, Vance represents “aggressive-demagogic, exclusionary politics.”
The book is once again highly sought after but Ullstein has decided not to renew the licence agreement to republish it in German. Publishing rights have been bought by another company, YES, which will publish new editions of the book in August.