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HE world is reeling, nothing makes sense anymore. Everybody has it in for those who voted for Donald Trump. Why did it happen, and who are the people who thought Trump would be the answer to their problems?

JD Vance’s memoir has been the go-to book for those trying to understand the white working-class in the US and why they voted Trump. The Economist blurbs: “You will not read a more important book about America.”

Vance writes truthfully, without pulling punches, about how difficult it was to grow up as a hillbilly — a term he embraces unashamedly. “I am a hill person,” he writes. “So is much of America’s white working-class. And we hill people aren’t doing very well.”

But Trump hadn’t happened yet when Vance was writing his book. Brexit was also still in the future. In an interview conducted by email, Vance said that at the time he wasn’t uneasy about political developments.

“I was more concerned with the lack of upward mobility in the US. Despite our country’s self-image, many poor children in the US fail to achieve any measure of material prosperity in their own lives. This is especially true in the southeastern US, and it breeds a sense of alienation that can sometimes infect our politics.”

His memoir is being lauded by many as key to understanding the Americans of the Rust Belt, the once booming steel-making region centred on Ohio, Michigan and Pennsylvania, whose decline Bruce Springsteen and others have immortalised.

The Rust Belt partly overlaps the Appalachian region, which stretches from southern New York state to Mississippi and Alabama. “Many of the parts of the country