Senator JD Vance isn’t the first Republican to back away from his past criticism of Donald Trump, but his reversal may be the most startling.
In a 2016 private Facebook message to his former Yale Law School roommate, Democratic Georgia state Senator Josh McLaurin, Vance said Trump could become “America’s Hitler.”
“I go back and forth between thinking Trump is a cynical asshole like Nixon who wouldn’t be that bad (and might even prove useful) or that he’s America’s Hitler,” Vance wrote.
The comment came to wide attention in 2022 during Vance’s Senate campaign and was one of many critical statements that Trump looked past when he named Vance as his vice presidential running mate on Monday.
“Obviously he’s a sellout, but the bigger deal is he’s angry and vindictive. The perfect fit for Trump’s revenge,” McLaurin said on social media on Monday, shortly after Vance was announced as Trump’s VP pick. “JD’s rise is a triumph for angry jerks everywhere.”
Vance condemned Trump on multiple occasions in 2016 in interviews related to Vance’s bestselling memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy,” which made him a go-to commentator on rural America and Trump’s political rise.
He argued that the then-Republican presidential nominee offered empty promises that wouldn’t fix the problems ailing communities like the one in Ohio, where Vance grew up.
“Trump is cultural heroin. He makes some feel better for a bit. But he cannot fix what ails them, and one day they’ll realise it,” Vance wrote in a July 2016 piece for The Atlantic.
Vance described himself as a “Never Trump guy” and called Trump an “idiot” in since-deleted tweets from that time. In an August 2016 interview with NPR, he even said he might vote for Hillary Clinton, the Democratic nominee for president, if he thought Trump might actually win.
“I think that he’s noxious and is leading the white working class to a very dark place,” Vance said.
However, when Vance entered politics with his Senate bid in 2021, he took it all back, saying he regretted his past comments.
“I ask folks not to judge me based on what I said in 2016, because I’ve been very open that I did say those critical things and I regret them, and I regret being wrong about the guy,” Vance told Fox News in 2021. “I think he was a good president, I think he made a lot of good decisions for people, and I think he took a lot of flak.”
That’s all there was to it. The grovelling won Vance Trump’s endorsement, which helped him secure a tough Republican primary, and ultimately landed him in the U.S. Senate, where he became one of Trump’s most aggressive supporters in Congress. And now, depending on how this year’s presidential election goes, Vance could very well become Trump’s vice president.
