An elephant.
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The backlash against Hillbilly Elegy author and newly minted Ohio Senate candidate J.D. Vance was fierce after he made the following observation in an interview with Time: former President Donald Trump "is the leader of this movement, and if I actually care about these people and the things I say I care about, I need to just suck it up and support him."

The prevailing interpretation is that, like the rest of the Republican Party, Vance understood Trump was a bad guy — in the Time writer's telling, he is "loud and racist and lie[s] a lot," which to Resistance and Never Trump folks is the whole story on the the 45th president — and then sold out to support him anyway. Leaving aside the fact that political parties do have to care about their voters' preferences, this is an unfair reading of Vance's comments.

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W. James Antle III

W. James Antle III is the politics editor of the Washington Examiner, the former editor of The American Conservative, and author of Devouring Freedom: Can Big Government Ever Be Stopped?.