Trump's VP Pick JD Vance Hasn't Always Been A Fan Of The Former President

It's official. Donald Trump has chosen his running mate, and it's not a repeat of the last time with Mike Pence. Instead, Trump has chosen Ohio Senator J.D. Vance, a bit of a left-field pick, for vice president. However, Vance hasn't always been the most ardent of Trump supporters. In fact, he's gone so far as to publicly disparage Trump when he was first running for office. And the internet has the receipts.

The "Hillbilly Elegy" author went so far as to compare Trump to Hitler. A screenshot of a private Facebook message from Vance to Josh McLaurin, a law school friend of his, has been posted to X, formerly known as Twitter. It has some of what appear to be Vance's candid thoughts about Trump. In the message, he called Trump "the fruit of the party's collective neglect." He seemed to think that Trump, at best, was either "a cynical a**hole like Nixon who wouldn't be that bad (or might even prove useful) or "America's Hitler."

In a July 2016 article for "The Atlantic," less than three weeks before Trump officially became the Republican presidential nominee that year, Vance compared Trump to a kind of opioid. He wrote, "Trump brings power to those who hate their lack of it, and his message is tonic to communities that have felt nothing but decline for decades." But for Vance, it seemed like Trump was all about sounding good and not actually doing good for those people.

J.D. Vance continuned to speak out against Donald Trump ahead of the 2016 election. That August, in an interview with ABC News, Vance said that Donald Trump wasn't someone who was "offering many solutions" to the problems being faced by many working class people in the U.S. A couple months later, during his interview with Charlie Rose, Vance was still anti- Trump. "I'm a Never Trump guy. I never liked him," he said (per Charlie Rose).

However, in 2021, Vance publicly apologized for his comments about Trump on Fox News, saying he now supported him, and he has ever since. Perhaps Vance's flip-flop came about because he was genuinely convinced by Trump's leadership and abilities to run the country? Or perhaps Vance saw an opportunity to hitch his political wagon to a star, as it were? In 2022, Vance's friend Josh McLaurin said, "He has adopted a destructive approach to politics that is centered primarily on distrust of opposition, fear of the other. I think that he has basically hollowed himself out as a person," via Cincinnati.com.

In Trump's Truth Social post that announced Vance as his vice-presidential pick, there's no mention of Vance's past insults. Trump briefly touched on them when he endorsed Vance's successful 2022 senate campaign, saying that Vance "gets it now, and I have seen that in spades," as reported by The Washington Post.