Republican Vice Presidenttal candidate JD Vance is a monumental flip-flopper when it comes to the potential president henow says he will support. He has compared Donald Trump to Hitler, called him a danger to America and worse.
But, as the old cliche goes, that was then and this is now.
It’s been evident for some time that Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) underwent a politically convenient evolution on Donald Trump. A staunch critic of Trump when he first ran for president in 2016, Vance gradually reinvented himself publicly and then fully embraced Trump for his own Senate race in 2022 — when he needed the votes of Trump supporters in a Republican primary. Now he’s Trump’s running mate.
Vance has always cast this evolution as a genuine shift born of reflection on Trump’s actual record. And that’s difficult to disprove.
But private Vance comments newly reported by The Washington Post’s Peter Jamison add a whole new layer to questions about what Vance really believes — because of both the comments’ substance and their timeline.
It wouldn’t be the first time an increasingly powerful politician seemed to favor strategic calculations over principled decisions. But the timeline here is important.
Vance’s comments criticizing Trump in 2016 have been widely and frequently reported. Vance suggested Trump might be “America’s Hitler” and called him “cultural heroin.” He criticized Trump for making immigrants and Muslims afraid.
But there wasn’t as much in that vein after Trump took office — at least publicly. What has come out has generally emerged from records of private comments Vance made.
When Vance first started his run for Senate, CNN reported that he had still been disparaging Trump privately in the summer of 2017, calling him a “moral disaster” and saying his administration had “no domestic policy agenda besides tax cuts.”
And now, Jamison reports this kind of criticism lasted well into Trump’s presidency — into Trump’s final year, in fact.
In direct messages sent in February 2020, Vance told someone he was corresponding with: “Trump has just so thoroughly failed to deliver on his economic populism (excepting a disjointed China policy).”
It’s not that unusual for candidates to change their positions on issues that will adv ance their political careers. bit Vance’s outright lies goes beyond what most do. His so-called “Hillbilly Elegy” is filled with outright lies about what existed in Appalachia and his life there. His campaign for the Senate was a case study on how to lie one’s way into office.
If Trump fails in this latest try to reutrn to the White House, which is increasingly likely, we can expect tot see Vance as the latest liar proposed by the decimated GOP for president in 2008.
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