It’s been evident for some time that Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) underwent a politically convenient evolution on Donald Trump. A staunch critic of Trump when he first ran for president in 2016, Vance gradually reinvented himself publicly and then fully embraced Trump for his own Senate race in 2022 — when he needed the votes of Trump supporters in a Republican primary. Now he’s Trump’s running mate.
Vance has always cast this evolution as a genuine shift born of reflection on Trump’s actual record. And that’s difficult to disprove.
But private Vance comments newly reported by The Washington Post’s Peter Jamison add a whole new layer to questions about what Vance really believes — because of both the comments’ substance and their timeline.
It wouldn’t be the first time an increasingly powerful politician seemed to favor strategic calculations over principled decisions. But the timeline here is important.
Vance’s comments criticizing Trump in 2016 have been widely and frequently reported. Vance suggested Trump might be “America’s Hitler” and called him “cultural heroin.” He criticized Trump for making immigrants and Muslims afraid.
But there wasn’t as much in that vein after Trump took office — at least publicly. What has come out has generally emerged from records of private comments Vance made.
When Vance first started his run for Senate, CNN reported that he had still been disparaging Trump privately in the summer of 2017, calling him a “moral disaster” and saying his administration had “no domestic policy agenda besides tax cuts.”
And now, Jamison reports this kind of criticism lasted well into Trump’s presidency — into Trump’s final year, in fact.
In direct messages sent in February 2020, Vance told someone he was corresponding with: “Trump has just so thoroughly failed to deliver on his economic populism (excepting a disjointed China policy).”
As Jamison notes, this is a contrast to what Vance would say just a year and a half later as an Ohio Senate candidate, when he said Trump “actually honored his promises.” Vance during the campaign would label Trump a “great president.”
It’s theoretically possible that Trump’s actions at the end of his presidency changed Vance’s mind, or that reflection brought Vance to a new verdict, as Vance has posited. It’s also possible Vance was saying things he thought his correspondent wanted to hear. Vance’s office told The Post that his comments meant to refer to “establishment Republicans who thwarted” Trump’s agenda.
But the comments are also a contrast to what Vance had said publicly even before February 2020. Toward the middle of Trump’s presidency, Vance began emphasizing the difference between Trump’s unwieldy personal style and his actual policies. And in May 2019, he said at an event held by the American Conservative that Trump’s policy toward China had been a “wild success.”
“He’s certainly nailed the China issue in a way that no American president has for the past 20 or 30 years,” said Vance, who nine months later would privately label Trump’s China policy “disjointed.”
The other thing that struck me from The Post’s new reporting is how Vance essentially grants that he’s making political calculations — and not for the first time.
In the same private February 2020 exchange, Vance’s interlocutor suggested the two of them were both working toward similar political goals.
“You’re playing a strategic game,” Vance wrote, “the same as me.”
In the 2017 comments unearthed by CNN, Vance alluded to how his criticisms of his party had marginalized him. In the course of his comment about Trump being a “moral disaster,” Vance scoffed at his own political prospects, while citing his opposition to Republicans’ health-care proposal.
“Can you imagine running as an anti-AHCA populist who thinks Trump is a moral disaster?” Vance wrote. “Where’s my constituency?”
(Vance was courted by some Republicans to run for Senate in 2018, but he passed on that opportunity.)
Even when Vance began running for Senate in 2021, he gestured, not subtly, at the idea that he had to take his medicine and back Trump. He told Time magazine just a day after announcing his campaign that Trump is “the leader of this movement.”
He added: “And if I actually care about these people and the things I say I care about, I need to just suck it up and support him.”
It is not news that politicians make political calculations and adjust what they say to please the voters they need. This is Politics 101.
But politicians’ evolutions on Trump have often been particularly drastic, as Vance’s certainly is. That makes it logical to wonder what they truly understand themselves to be enabling. And for Vance, as he tries to ascend to an office a stop away from the presidency, that just became a more pertinent question.