Vice-presidential nominee JD Vance has a go-to explanation for his evolution from outspoken critic to impassioned defender of Donald Trump: He says he was converted by Trump\u2019s achievements in the White House.<\/p>\n
Vance has said watching the former president enact his populist agenda for left-behind Americans transformed him from a \u201cNever Trump\u201d conservative in 2016 to a Trump supporter in 2020.<\/p>\n
But Vance privately expressed a very different verdict on Trump as the former president\u2019s first term was nearing its end, previously unreported messages obtained by The Washington Post show.<\/p>\n
In the direct messages \u2014 sent during Trump\u2019s final year in office to an acquaintance over the social media platform then known as Twitter \u2014 Vance harshly criticized his future running mate\u2019s record of governance and said Trump had not fulfilled his economic agenda.<\/p>\n
\u201cTrump has just so thoroughly failed to deliver on his economic populism (excepting a disjointed China policy),\u201d Vance wrote in February 2020.<\/p>\n
He also offered a prediction: Joe Biden, he believed, was going to win the 2020 election.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think Trump will probably lose,\u201d he wrote in a message in June 2020, a few months before ballots were cast in an election that Vance would later claim, falsely and repeatedly, was stolen by the Democrats.<\/p>\n
The critical messages, shared with The Post by their recipient on the condition of anonymity because of concerns about retaliation, cast doubt on Vance\u2019s oft-recited account of how and when he embraced Trumpism. They were written years after Vance\u2019s previously reported remarks attacking Trump, such as his statements in 2016 that Trump was \u201creprehensible,\u201d \u201ccultural heroin\u201d and possibly \u201cAmerica\u2019s Hitler.\u201d<\/p>\n
In a statement, Vance spokesman William Martin said Vance\u2019s 2020 assessment of Trump\u2019s failure to deliver on his economic policies was not meant as a criticism of the former president, but of \u201cestablishment Republicans who thwarted much of Trump\u2019s populist economic agenda to increase tariffs and boost domestic manufacturing in Congress.\u201d<\/p>\n
Martin added, \u201cFortunately, Sen. Vance believes that Republicans in Congress are much more aligned with President Trump\u2019s agenda today than they were back then, so he is confident that they won\u2019t run into those same issues within the party.\u201d<\/p>\n
Vance\u2019s campaign did not respond to questions about his prediction that Trump would lose the 2020 election.<\/p>\n
While Martin said Vance recalled the 2020 exchanges, he criticized The Post for not identifying the person who disclosed the messages and for not sharing with the campaign the entirety of the conversation, portions of which were withheld to protect the person\u2019s anonymity. Martin said The Post was engaged in \u201cnothing more than unethical journalism.\u201d<\/p>\n
Vance has never pinpointed a moment when he became a fully committed Trump supporter, instead describing a gradual conversion away from his earlier views that was complete by the end of Trump\u2019s first term. He says he was moved \u201cto change my tune about President Trump from 2016 to 2020\u201d and that he voted for Trump in 2020. He has sought to isolate his critiques of Trump to a chapter of his life that is now in the distant past.<\/p>\n
\u201cLike a lot of people, I criticized Trump back in 2016,\u201d Vance said shortly after he began campaigning for Senate in 2021. \u201cAnd I ask folks not to judge me based on what I said in 2016, because I\u2019ve been very open that I did say those critical things and I regret them, and I regret being wrong about the guy. I think he was a good president, I think he made a lot of good decisions for people, and I think he took a lot of flak.\u201d<\/p>\n
But the messages show that Vance still took a dim view of Trump\u2019s achievements long after 2016 \u2014 and after almost four years of observing how the man he now calls \u201cthe best president of my lifetime\u201d behaved in office. In fact, during the same June 2020 exchange when he said Trump was likely to lose the upcoming election, Vance seemed to suggest he had been offered a position in the Trump administration.<\/p>\n
He claimed he had rejected it.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019ve already turned down my appointment from the emperor,\u201d Vance wrote \u2014 adding a winking emoji \u2014 after his interlocutor referred to the possibility of a government appointment by \u201cEmperor Trump.\u201d Pressed by his acquaintance about what job he had been offered, Vance replied, \u201cI\u2019m not going to say over twitter messenger.\u201d<\/p>\n
Neither Trump nor Vance has ever disclosed that he was offered a role working for Trump before he was selected as the GOP vice-presidential nominee in July. The Vance campaign did not address questions about whether Vance had been offered a job.<\/p>\n
The exchanges are further evidence of Vance\u2019s penchant for engaging in prolific and sometimes incautious dialogues with digital pen pals, including a 20-month texting conversation with the far-right blogger and conspiracy theorist Charles Johnson.<\/p>\n
Vance rose to fame in 2016 with his critically acclaimed memoir, \u201cHillbilly Elegy,\u201d about growing up in a Midwestern family riven by drug addiction. A Yale Law School graduate who at the time worked as a venture capitalist in Silicon Valley, he established his reputation as a fluent commentator on the despair of the White working class \u2014 and as one of a minority of conservatives opposed to Trump, whom he described as \u201cleading the white working class to a very dark place.\u201d<\/p>\n
Vance has said he voted for independent presidential candidate Evan McMullin in 2016 but changed his mind about Trump over the next four years because, as he put it in 2021, \u201che actually honored his promises\u201d in the White House.<\/p>\n
The messages obtained by The Post reveal Vance in a garrulous and seemingly unguarded mood. He wrote them after initiating contact with their recipient, whose published writing interested him.<\/p>\n
In their exchanges, Vance criticized the left in a way that aligns with his more recent public statements, worrying about \u201cthe woke stuff\u201d and saying he believed progressive Democrats will inevitably be \u201ccoopted by financial elites.\u201d He also talked about his belief that government policy should make it easier for women to stay out of the workforce to care for their children, if they desire to do so.<\/p>\n
But he also expressed views that appear jarringly at odds with the positions he would soon adopt as a politician. In one message, he mused about how the right focused on the harm caused by pandemic lockdowns while underplaying the dangers of the coronavirus.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m sympathetic to the idea that there\u2019s a lot of long-term economic damage being done. But it\u2019s always draped in this bizarre desire to pretend the virus itself isn\u2019t a problem,\u201d he wrote in May 2020.<\/p>\n
The next year, as a Senate candidate, Vance denounced what he described as a \u201ccabal\u201d of public health experts, led by White House adviser Anthony S. Fauci, that he said was seeking to suppress American liberties with unreasonable pandemic restrictions. As a senator he has pushed to ban federal mask mandates.<\/p>\n
Martin, the Vance campaign spokesman, said, \u201cJust like billions of other people all over the world, Sen. Vance\u2019s views on COVID in May of 2020 were not the same as his views on the pandemic in 2021.\u201d<\/p>\n
In another of the 2020 messages, he expressed openness to a holy grail of the progressive left: a government-run universal health-care system, or Medicare-for-all. In a February 2020 message Vance wrote that \u201cM4A,\u201d as he called it, \u201cis maybe a net positive, maybe not (details matter).\u201d<\/p>\n
Medicare-for-all, a plan in which the government would provide health insurance to every citizen \u2014 effectively replacing the private health insurance industry \u2014 was briefly endorsed by Kamala Harris during her failed 2019 presidential bid, when she tacked to the left in the primary. As the Democratic nominee she has distanced herself from that position but is still subject to attacks from the right \u2014 including the Trump campaign \u2014 for once supporting the idea.<\/p>\n
In recent weeks Vance has argued for a strikingly different approach to health coverage, saying the federal government should roll back the regulations of the Affordable Care Act and allow insurers to group the sickest people into separate \u201crisk pools.\u201d Critics of that plan say it would result in people with preexisting conditions being forced to pay exorbitant insurance premiums, or not being able to find insurance at all.<\/p>\n
Vance\u2019s spokesman said the vice-presidential nominee now believes Medicare for All to be bad policy.<\/p>\n
\u201cSen. Vance, like President Trump, doesn\u2019t want people dying in the streets, but believes the details matter,\u201d Martin said. \u201cAnd the Democrats top-down Medicare for All plan would make healthcare worse for Americans.\u201d<\/p>\n
Vance\u2019s judgment that Trump had \u201cthoroughly failed to deliver on his economic populism\u201d came in the context of a discussion of wealthy business executives \u2014 such as former New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg or former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi \u2014 running for office.<\/p>\n
Vance said he doubted that Trump\u2019s richest donors would abandon him in 2020 because he had continued to serve their interests as president, despite his populist rhetoric.<\/p>\n
\u201cNot sure any of these people feel like they need to switch sides,\u201d he wrote.<\/p>\n
Vance gave no hint in the messages of the enthusiasm with which he would soon publicly embrace Trumpism. But he did indicate that he was thinking carefully about his future.<\/p>\n
In February 2020, he wrote to his acquaintance that he believed they were both working with the same long-term approach to achieve their political goals.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou\u2019re playing a strategic game,\u201d Vance wrote, \u201cthe same as me.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Vice-presidential nominee JD Vance has a go-to explanation for his evolution from outspoken critic to impassioned defender of Donald Trump: He says he was converted by Trump\u2019s achievements in the White House. Vance has said watching the former president enact his populist agenda for left-behind Americans transformed him from a \u201cNever Trump\u201d conservative in 2016 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":10234,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10233","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10233","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10233"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10233\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10234"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10233"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10233"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10233"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}