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."
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