Leaked Private Messages Reveal JD Vance Slamming Trump’s First Term: ‘Thoroughly Failed to Deliver’
(AP Photo/Yuki Iwamura, File)
Leaked private messages reveal that Republican vice presidential nominee and Senator JD Vance (R-OH) slammed his running mate’s first term in office.
The messages, obtained by The Washington Post, paint a much different picture of former President Donald Trump’s first stint in the White House than the one Vance describes on the campaign trail today.
“Trump has just so thoroughly failed to deliver on his economic populism (excepting a disjointed China policy),” wrote Vance in February 2020.
Vance’s criticism of Trump — which included comparisons to Adolf Hitler, accusations of sexual assault, and more — during the 2016 presidential campaign and in its immediate aftermath has been well-documented. But the senator has long claimed that he came to appreciate Trump for his performance in office.
“Like a lot of people, I criticized Trump back in 2016. And I ask folks not to judge me based on what I said in 2016, because I’ve been very open that I did say those critical things and I regret them, and I regret being wrong about the guy,” said Vance while campaigning for the Senate in 2021, just one year after he excoriated Trump in private. “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.”
In other messages from June 2020, Vance predicted that Trump would “probably lose” the upcoming election and boasted that he had already turned down an appointment from the then-commander-in-chief.
The prediction is particularly notable considering the fact that Vance has parroted Trump’s false claim that the 2020 election was stolen from him and said he would have followed Trump’s instructions instead of certifying the results on January 6, 2021.
“If I had been vice-president, I would have told the states, like Pennsylvania, Georgia, and so many others, that we needed to have multiple slates of electors, and I think the US Congress should have fought over it from there,” said Vance in an interview earlier this year. “That is the legitimate way to deal with an election that a lot of folks, including me, think had a lot of problems in 2020.”
