The not-so-kind things J.D. Vance said about Trump before he was VP pick - The Washington Post

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Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio), who was just named Donald Trump's running mate, is a staunch supporter of the former president. But that hasn't always been the case.

Here are some of Vance's past criticisms of Trump.

A "cynical asshole" or "America's Hitler."

In February 2016, Vance sent a message to his former law school roommate, Josh McLaurin, that McLaurin has recounted publicly. In it, Vance said he went "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," according to a screenshot McLaurin shared on social media in 2022 when Vance was running for Senate in Ohio.

"I never could have dreamed during those exchanges in 2016 that he would end up being one of the principal reinforcers of Trumpism only a few years later," said McLaurin, who is now a Democratic state senator in Georgia.

McLaurin warned in an interview earlier this month that Vance might be Trump's "most dangerous" pick as someone who would double down on Trump's vitriol and retribution. He cited Vance's ability to identify and connect with the anger felt by the MAGA base and how he wielded that skill to get elected and campaign for Trump.

In his Senate campaign at the time, Vance dismissed the message to McLaurin as old news.

"Trump is cultural heroin."

In a July 2016 piece for the Atlantic magazine, Vance compared Trump to "cultural heroin," a "new pain reliever" that promised easy solutions to the mounting social problems of suffering communities — but that ultimately "could not fix what ails them."

"To every complex problem, he promises a simple solution," Vance wrote, citing Trump's promises to bring jobs back by simply punishing offshoring companies or to cure the opioid epidemic by building a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border. "He never offers details for how these plans will work, because he can't. Trump's promises are the needle in America's collective vein."

Trump's messaging worked, in part, because so many of the problems he identified were real, Vance added.

"Trump is cultural heroin. He makes some feel better for a bit. But he cannot fix what ails them, and one day they'll realize it," Vance wrote.

"I can't stomach Trump."

In an August 2016 interview with NPR's Terry Gross, Vance mused that he "might have to hold my nose and vote for Hillary Clinton" if he thought Trump had a really good chance of winning — or, he joked, he might write in his dog on the November ballot.

"But I think that I'm going to vote third party because I can't stomach Trump," Vance said. "I think that he's noxious and is leading the White working class to a very dark place. And ultimately I just don't share Hillary Clinton's politics."

In a 2018 print run of his book, Vance revealed that he had voted for a third-party candidate. He has said that he voted for Trump in 2020.

"Fellow Christians, everyone is watching us when we apologize for this man."

In October 2016, after a video from "Access Hollywood" emerged that showed Trump bragging about groping women — and saying that "when you're a star, they let you do it" — Vance lamented on Twitter, now X, suggesting that to justify Trump's behavior was un-Christian.

"Fellow Christians, everyone is watching us when we apologize for this man. Lord help us," Vance wrote in a since-deleted tweet.

In another since-deleted tweet just two days later, Vance wrote that he found Trump "reprehensible."

"Trump makes people I care about afraid. Immigrants, Muslims, etc. Because of this I find him reprehensible. God wants better of us," Vance wrote then.

"I'm a 'Never Trump' guy. I never liked him."

A few weeks before Trump was elected president, Vance sat down for a lengthy interview with Charlie Rose in which he tried to explain the motivation behind White working-class voters like the ones with whom he grew up.

Vance told Rose that voter attraction to Trump was driven not by "any special quality of Donald Trump himself, but of the fact that folks feel very resentful at the media establishment, the political establishment, the financial establishment and so forth."

He also said he did not believe there were enough White working-class voters to elect Trump but cautioned that telling those voters Trump was a "terrible candidate" would backfire.

"I'm a 'Never Trump' guy. I never liked him," Vance told Rose. "But I noticed this willingness from people who think a lot like I do that, look, we told you so. … The problem is if you take that attitude as sort of gloating over Trump's defeat, then you're playing into the very thing that gave rise to Trump in the first place, which is a feeling that the elites think that they are smarter than you and just think you're a bunch of idiots."