 He very much espouses a lot of the populist rhetoric that we hear from Donald Trump. Of course, his best-selling memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, which came out in the aftermath of Trump's election, many saw as something that explained how the Trump effect happened in America as he grew up in a manufacturing town in Ohio where his family was plagued by issues of drug addiction and just a lower-income existence in which he saw many people around him struggling.