JD Vance once compared Trump to Hitler

7/11/2024 6:04

        Eight years ago, in the lead-up to the
        2016 presidential election, JD Vance was a bitter critic of
        Donald Trump.
        
        Publicly, he called the Republican businessman an "idiot"
        and said he was "reprehensible." Privately, he compared him to
        Adolf Hitler.
        
        But by the time the former president tapped Vance to be his
        running mate in July, the Ohio native had become one of Trump's
        most ardent defenders. With Trump's decisive win in Tuesday's
        presidential election, Vance, 40, also became the heir apparent
        to Trump's re-energized Make America Great Again movement.
        
        Vance's transformation - from self-described "never
        Trumper" to stalwart loyalist - makes him a relatively unusual
        figure in Trump's inner circle. Just two years into his first
        term as a U.S. senator, the only public office he has held,
        Vance will be one of the country's youngest-ever vice
        presidents.
        
        Democrats and even some Republicans have questioned
        whether Vance, author of the 2016 bestselling memoir "Hillbilly
        Elegy," is driven more by opportunism than ideology.
        
        But Trump and many of his allies and advisers see Vance's
        transformation as genuine.
        
        They say that Vance's political beliefs - which mix
        isolationism with economic populism - dovetail with those of
        Trump and put both men at odds with the old guard of the
        Republican Party, where foreign policy hawks and free market
        evangelists still hold sway.
        
        Conservative commentator Tucker Carlson, a vocal Vance
        supporter, told Reuters that Vance understood what Trump was
        running on - "and, unlike the rest of the Republican Party in
        Washington, agrees with it."
        
        While the contours of Trump's second administration are
        still fuzzy, Vance, a Yale Law graduate, could play a role in
        policy formulation.
        
        "I really do believe that with better leadership we are
        on the cusp of a golden age of American prosperity," Vance said
        at an Arizona rally last week.
        
        MODEST ROOTS
        
        Vance was born into an impoverished home in southern
        Ohio, and his story of modest origins was a key part of his
        stump speech.
        
        Some Trump advisers who supported his selection as the
        Republican's running mate argued he could boost the campaign's
        Rust Belt bona fides in a race that would be determined by
        voters in a handful of battleground states, including nearby
        Pennsylvania and Michigan.
        
        At first, Vance's hardcore conservative views and
        sometimes-awkward appearances on the trail gave Trump allies and
        donors pause. Democrats re-surfaced 2021 comments in which Vance
        disparaged women without children as "childless cat ladies,"
        potentially hurting the campaign's standing among women.
        
        But as the race wore on, Vance showed some prowess at
        tailoring his message to his audience.
        
        In September, Vance
        
        amplified
        
        a baseless conspiracy theory holding that Haitian
        immigrants were eating household pets in Ohio, a false tale that
        energized Trump's conservative base. Trump repeated it during
        his debate with Vice President Kamala Harris.
        
        Just weeks later, however, Vance came off as
        
        conciliatory and warm
        
        in a debate with Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, the
        Democratic vice-presidential candidate, showing a level of
        discipline Trump often lacks.
        
        "Turned out to be a good choice," Trump said of Vance on
        Wednesday as they addressed cheering supporters, with Trump
        noting he had "taken a little heat" at first for picking the
        polarizing senator as his No. 2.
        
        
        
        GRADUAL EVOLUTION
        
        After serving in the Marine Corps, attending Yale Law and
        working as a venture capitalist in San Francisco, Vance rose to
        national prominence thanks to his memoir. In the book, he
        explored the socioeconomic problems confronting his hometown and
        attempted to explain Trump's popularity among impoverished white
        Americans to readers.
        
        He was harshly critical of Trump, both publicly and
        privately, in 2016 and during the opening stages of Trump's
        2017-2021 term in the White House.
        
        "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," he wrote privately
        to an associate on Facebook in 2016.
        
        When his Hitler comment was first reported, in 2022, a
        spokesperson did not dispute it, but said it no longer
        represented Vance's views.
        
        By the time Vance ran for Senate in 2022, his demonstrations
        of loyalty - which included downplaying the Jan. 6, 2021 attack
        on the U.S. Capitol by Trump's supporters - were sufficient to
        score the former president's coveted endorsement. Trump's
        support helped put him over the top in a competitive primary.
        
        In media interviews, Vance has said there was no "Eureka"
        moment that changed his views on Trump. Rather, he gradually
        realized that his opposition to the former president was rooted
        in style rather than substance.
        
        For instance, he agreed with Trump's contentions that free
        trade had hollowed out middle America by crushing domestic
        manufacturing and that the nation's leaders were too quick to
        get involved in foreign wars.
        
        "I allowed myself to focus so much on the stylistic element
        of Trump that I completely ignored the way in which he
        substantively was offering something very different on foreign
        policy, on trade, on immigration," Vance told the New York Times
        in June.
        
        In the same interview, Vance said that he met Trump in 2021
        and that the two grew closer during his Senate campaign.
        
        The Ohio senator's detractors see his shift in views as a
        cynical ploy to ascend the ranks of Republican politics.
        
        "What you see is some really profound opportunism," said
        David Niven, an associate professor of politics at the
        University of Cincinnati who has worked as a speechwriter for
        two Democratic governors.
        
        One issue where Vance's position appears to have converged
        with Trump is abortion.
        
        Vance implied in a 2021 interview that victims of rape and
        incest should be required to carry pregnancies to term, and in
        November 2023 he described a vote by Ohioans to add the right to
        abortion care to the state's constitution as a "gut punch."
        
        This year, he said he supports access to the abortion pill
        mifepristone, a view that Trump shares.
        
        
        
        RELATIONSHIP WITH TRUMP
        
        Before Vance developed a relationship with the
        president-elect, he grew close with Trump's eldest son, Donald
        Trump Jr., according to several people familiar with their
        relationship. Both are now key figures in the presidential
        transition effort.
        
        Vance first caught Trump Jr.'s eye when he opposed aid to
        Ukraine during the Ohio Senate primary in 2022, according to one
        of those people, a position that put him at odds with the other
        Republicans in the race.
        
        Vance's personal relationship with Trump developed for the
        most part during the Republican presidential primary earlier
        this year, that person said. Vance's decision to endorse Trump
        in January 2023, well before some other vice-presidential
        hopefuls, served as an important demonstration of loyalty, that
        person added.
        
        In February 2023, Trump and Vance visited East Palestine,
        Ohio, the site of a toxic train derailment, a trip that raised
        Vance's national profile. They portrayed Democratic President
        Joe Biden's decision at the time not to visit the working-class
        community as a betrayal of middle America.
        
        The White House noted at the time that federal agents were
        on the scene almost immediately after the derailment, and that
        visiting a disaster site can distract from local recovery
        efforts. Biden eventually visited East Palestine roughly a year
        later, in February 2024.
        
        Behind the scenes, Vance helped convince wealthy donors to
        open their wallets to Trump, according to two people with
        knowledge of Trump's fundraising operations. Vance, for
        instance, helped put together a Bay Area fundraiser in June
        hosted by venture capitalists David Sacks and Chamath
        Palihapitiya, one of those people said.
        
        Vance's skepticism of corporate America, support for
        tariffs, weariness of foreign entanglements and his youth make
        him a leading voice of a new Republican Party that is more
        focused on the working class than big business in the eyes of
        supporters.
        
        But detractors say he has merely copied Trump, in a brazen
        attempt to climb the rungs of power as quickly as possible.
        
        "Vance is an echo to Trump," said Niven, "not a new voice."