Vice presidential hopeful Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) has already had to do damage control for public statements bashing his running mate, Donald Trump, throughout the 2016 election cycle, but new reporting indicated that Vance’s dislike for the former president continued throughout Trump’s time in the White House.
According to text messages obtained by The Washington Post, in 2020 — shortly before the end of Trump’s time in office — Vance complained that “Trump has just so thoroughly failed to deliver on his economic populism (excepting a disjointed China policy).”
In the conversation, Vance predicted that Trump would lose the 2020 election. “I think Trump will probably lose,” he wrote in June of 2020.
Vance has since become a staunch defender of Trump’s false claims of election fraud.
The conversation took place via direct messages on X (then Twitter), with an individual granted anonymity by the Post who was described as a “social media acquaintance” of Vance’s. In 2020, Trump’s now VP-pick bragged that he had “already turned down my appointment from the emperor,” referring to Trump. Vance did not clarify what position he had been offered, telling the recipient that he wasn’t “going to say over Twitter messenger.”
In a statement to the Post, Vance spokesman William Martin tried to reframe the messages as criticism of “establishment Republicans who thwarted much of Trump’s populist economic agenda to increase tariffs and boost domestic manufacturing in Congress.”
“Fortunately, Sen. Vance believes that Republicans in Congress are much more aligned with President Trump’s agenda today than they were back then, so he is confident that they won’t run into those same issues within the party,” he added.
Trump selected Vance as his 2024 running mate in July, prompting a revival of scrutiny into the senator’s past comments about the former president. In 2016, Vance suggested that Trump might be “America’s Hitler,” in text messages to a former roommate. In a 2016 op-ed in The New York Times, Vance wrote that then-candidate Trump was “unfit for our nation’s highest office.” That same year, Vance described himself as “a Never Trump guy.”
“Trump makes people I care about afraid. Immigrants, Muslims, etc. Because of this I find him reprehensible. God wants better of us,” Vance wrote on X in October 2016.
In 2021, Vance announced he would be running for the Senate in a campaign heavily funded by conservative billionaire Peter Thiel, and changed his tune on the former president. Vance rode a wave of Trumpism to victory in 2022, but even voters in Ohio were not convinced of his MAGA bonafides. Despite securing an endorsement from Trump and winning the election, Vance severely underperformed other Republican candidates in the state.
In 2024, Vance is still struggling to convince Republican voters that he’s the real deal. Favorability polls show that Vance is one of the most unpopular vice-presidential candidates in recent history. A recent survey by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research found that Vance is less popular than Democratic VP pick Tim Walz, and is losing ground among Independent voters.
Vance and Walz are set to debate each other on Tuesday in New York City, and with just a handful of weeks left before Election Day, you can bet that Vance would rather not spend his time trying to explain away his well-documented dislike for the Republican nominee.
