J.D. Vance has a running song. “I listen to it every time I run,” the new junior senator from Ohio says. “I ran this morning so now it’s stuck in my head.” We’re standing outside his office; his aide is holding the door open, seemingly desperate to get the senator back into the safety of a reporter-less room. Usually Vance is good about this dynamic. It took four days to break through the senator’s “no hallway interviews” discipline, ultimately with a question on catalytic converter theft breaking the ice. By the next day he was talking, even about the 1990s rock song “One Headlight” by The Wallflowers, which Jakob Dylan, the band’s lead singer once said is ultimately about “the death of ideas.”

Vance was sworn into a quiet Senate—one in stark contrast to the newly minted, chaotic, Republican House. He moved into the office next door to John Fetterman’s. The two share identical temporary spaces; small and tucked away down a service corridor in the basement of a Senate building. Both freshman senators avoided hallway interviews with the Capitol press during their first weeks in the Senate—Fetterman because his auditory function is impaired by the stroke he suffered on the campaign trail; Vance because he was simply unwilling to engage, at first.

Rather, Vance’s presence in his early weeks were defined mostly by his Fox News appearances, of which there have been many, and his incendiary interrogations during committee hearings—like the time he asked Gigi Sohn, the consumer advocate Joe Biden has now nominated three times to serve on the FCC, if she would approve of someone who made the statement: “President Obama is a raggedy Black supremacist president and his cowardly enablers would rather kill everybody than stop killing white people.”

“Do you think a person who said that should be appointed or confirmed to the FCC?” he charged her with.

Sohn made Vance repeat the question. Vance repeated the cringeworthy statement about Obama. “You retweeted the exact same thing, only with President Trump instead of President Obama and the races reversed,” Vance declared.

This is the kind of white grievance heroism Vance became particularly adept at on the campaign trail, enough to transform from the country’s—even Hollywood’s!—anti–Donald Trump Hillbilly Elegy darling, to Trump’s star choice in Ohio’s Senate contest. This is the man who ran a campaign ad titled “Are you a racist?” decrying Biden’s immigration agenda for allowing “Democrat voters” to pour over the borders. Whether it is all an act or Vance really has been radicalized, as Simon van Zuylen-Wood posed in the The Washington Post, his entrance into the Senate indicates that the shitposting (the posing with a gun ready to shoot down a Chinese spy balloon) and bearded, red meat stylism isn’t going anywhere.

Then a train came off the track in East Palestine, Ohio.