PURE REACTION:

[Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky]  like Vance, grew up in Appalachia, albeit in apparently more middle-class circumstances. Also like Vance, he came to Congress comparatively young (41 to Vance's 37) and after achieving rare academic and business success; Massie has a master's from MIT and a successful tech startup.

More important than those biographical similarities, however, is that Massie entered national politics as "the real deal" of a different philosophical strain. Early in his tenure, he stood out in the GOP caucus for breaking with his own party's leadership and fastidiously voting against legislation he deemed unconstitutional or unaffordable. He won re-election in the next race and the next, seemingly lucky to have a district with an unusual love of liberty.

Then Trump arrived, and Massie had a moment of dismal clarity. He'd been on the campaign trail in Kentucky and Iowa in 2016, he told the Washington Examiner a year later, and found supposedly "libertarian" voters all going for the very unlibertarian Trump. "All this time, I thought [my supporters] were voting for libertarian Republicans," Massie said. "But after some soul searching, I realized when they voted for [Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.)] and [former Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas)] and me in these primaries, they weren't voting for libertarian ideas--they were voting for the craziest son of a bitch in the race. And Donald Trump won best in class, as we had up until he came along."

At that crossroads, Massie, it appears, decided to keep courting these voters with a taste for the "craziest son of a bitch." He started maintaining an increasingly inflammatory Twitter presence, allying with the likes of QAnon enthusiast Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, the Georgia Republican, and feeding the maw of the culture war even though it sometimes put him in conflict with his libertarian ideals.  

Vance too is the child of Appalachia where he had a chaotic childhood as detailed in his bestselling memoir, Hillbilly Elegy. He then went to the Marine Corps. And to Massie's MIT he went to Yale law. From there he became a venture capitalist and gained fame as a NeverTrump conservative who actually called Trump "America's Hitler." Then, just as stunningly as with Massie, he dramatically reversed course--and did it so convincingly that he landed an endorsement from the famously unforgiving Trump.

Vance might have arrived at the crossroads at a different point in his political career than Massie, but he made the same choice. After warning "[f]ellow Christians" that "everyone is watching us when we apologize for" the "reprehensible" "cultural heroin" that is Trump, Vance learned to "suck it up and support him"--or, at least, to act as if he does in public. Vance explained his transformation at the Dallas CPAC earlier this month by telling the attendees that, as he mentioned on Fox News, his shift was inspired by the ex-president's record in office. "[I]t's actually refreshing for a person who's running for political office to not try to hide or pretend they didn't say something," Vance said. The only problem is that Vance's 2016 opposition to Trump was always about matters of character, not policy, and Trump's character did not change.

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