Sen. J.D. Vance will officially be joining Donald Trump on the Republican ticket this fall — but he didn’t always have kind words for his running mate.
In the year before Trump took the Oval Office, Vance, who once described himself as a “Never Trump guy,” was quick to criticize the former president, using words like “idiot” and even “Hitler” to describe Trump.
Since then, Vance said he regrets his past criticism of Trump — especially during his contentious Republican Senate primary in 2021. The Ohio senator, who got Trump’s endorsement in the primary, has also since called Trump a great president.
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But before the endorsement that helped him grab a Senate seat, here are five things the vice presidential pick said about Trump:
“I’m a Never Trump guy.”
“I’m a ‘Never Trump’ guy,” Vance said in an interview with Charlie Rose in 2016, while publicizing his memoir “Hillbilly Elegy.” “I never liked him.”
“As somebody who doesn’t like Trump, myself, I sort of — I understand where Trump’s voters come from,” Vance later said in the Rose interview. “But I also don’t like Trump himself, and that made me realize that maybe I’m not quite part of either world totally.”
During Vance’s Senate Republican primary in 2021, the interview clip was used regularly in ads from Club for Growth Action and USA Freedom Fund, who were backing another Republican candidate and aimed to show discord between Vance and Trump.
“My god, what an idiot.”
Also included in the ads from Club for Growth Action and USA Freedom Fund were some of Vance’s since-deleted tweets criticizing the former president.
“My god what an idiot,” Vance wrote in one of the tweets. It was one of many tweets now deleted.
“America’s Hitler”
Vance once questioned whether Trump could be “America’s Hitler” in a private Facebook message in 2016 to one of his former roommates.
It was that or a “cynical asshole like Nixon,” Vance wrote in messages to former Yale Law School classmate Josh McLaurin, now a Democratic state senator in Georgia.
It’s a statement Democrats highlighted after Trump was shot at during a rally on Saturday night. Soon after the attack, Vance was quick to post that the Biden campaign’s rhetoric “led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.”
Vance added, “The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs.”
Democratic Rep. Eric Swalwell of California was quick to point out Vance’s old text messages on Sunday: “You called Trump “American Hitler” — now show your self back to the kids’ table,” he said on social media.
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“Mr. Trump is unfit for our nation’s highest office.”
Vance, who first became popular as an author, once wrote an op-ed for The New York Times titled “Why Trump’s Antiwar Message Resonates with White America.” He didn’t hold back his disapproval for the former president then while also describing his own belief as to why people in the communities he grew up in supported Trump.
“Mr. Trump is unfit for our nation’s highest office,” he wrote in the op-ed, describing his own families’ adoration and commitment to Trump.
“I can’t stomach Trump.”
And while Vance will join Trump as his running mate this fall, in 2016, Vance said he didn’t plan on voting for Trump — instead opting for a third-party candidate.
In a now-deleted tweet weeks before the election, Vance wrote that he would be voting for third-party candidate Evan McMullin, a former CIA officer who ran as an independent.
“I can’t stomach Trump,” Vance said in an interview with NPR, when describing why he would vote for a third-party candidate. “I think that he’s noxious and is leading the white working class to a very dark place.”
He even considered voting for Hillary Clinton over Trump: “I think there’s a chance, if I feel like Trump has a really good chance of winning, that I might have to hold my nose and vote for Hillary Clinton.”
A spokesperson for Vance did not immediately respond for comment.
