Reflecting on how heroin and prescription opioids had ravaged his home state of Ohio, Vance worried that a certain Republican candidate for president would have a similar effect. “[Donald] Trump is cultural heroin. He makes some feel better for a bit. But he cannot fix what ails them, and one day they’ll realize it,” he wrote in The Atlantic in July 2016.

Instead, it’s Vance who has had a realization: He’s decided that Trump’s cultural heroin is too powerful to resist, so he might as well become a dealer. In the crudest electoral terms, Vance’s epiphany proved right. After winning the former president’s endorsement last month, Vance overcame a ham-fisted campaign and rose from the middle of the pack to triumph in Tuesday’s GOP primary for the U.S. Senate in Ohio…

On the campaign trail, however, Vance has adopted Trump’s stump style. He has blamed Mark Zuckerberg for Trump’s loss in 2020, flirted with election-fraud conspiracy theories, charged into culture-war attacks on Alec Baldwin and LeBron James, and found a steadfast ally in Marjorie Taylor Greene. None of this will help left-behind Ohioans, as he knows. They may or may not realize it; many may be cynical about their futures but happy to just have someone sticking it to their cultural enemies. That may be understandable, but it’s the sort of nihilist scapegoating that 2016-era Vance would probably have rejected.

“Trump’s promises are the needle in America’s collective vein,” Vance wrote back then. Today, he’s happy to help you get a fix.