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’s achievements in the White House.
Vance has said watching the former president enact his populist agenda for left-behind Americans transformed him from a “Never Trump” conservative in 2016 to a Trump supporter in 2020.
But Vance privately expressed a very different verdict on Trump as the former president’s first term was nearing its end, previously unreported messages obtained by The Washington Post show.
In the direct messages — sent during Trump’s final year in office to an acquaintance over the social media platform then known as Twitter — Vance harshly criticized his future running mate’s record of governance and said Trump had not fulfilled his economic agenda.
“Trump has just so thoroughly failed to deliver on his economic populism (excepting a disjointed China policy),” Vance wrote in February 2020.
He also offered a prediction: Joe Biden, he believed, was going to win the 2020 election.
“I think Trump will probably lose,” 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.
The critical messages, shared with The Post by their recipient on the condition of anonymity because of concerns about retaliation, cast doubt on Vance’s oft-recited account of how and when he embraced Trumpism. They were written years after Vance’s previously reported remarks attacking Trump, such as his statements in 2016 that Trump was “reprehensible,” “cultural heroin” and possibly “America’s Hitler.”
In a statement, Vance spokesman William Martin said Vance’s 2020 assessment of Trump’s failure to deliver on his economic policies was not meant as a criticism of the former president, but of “establishment Republicans who thwarted much of Trump’s populist economic agenda to increase tariffs and boost domestic manufacturing in Congress.”
Martin added, “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.”
Vance’s campaign did not respond to questions about his prediction that Trump would lose the 2020 election.
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’s anonymity. Martin said The Post was engaged in “nothing more than unethical journalism.”
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’s first term. He says he was moved “to change my tune about President Trump from 2016 to 2020” 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.
“Like a lot of people, I criticized Trump back in 2016,” Vance said shortly after he began campaigning for Senate in 2021. “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. 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.”
But the messages show that Vance still took a dim view of Trump’s achievements long after 2016 — and after almost four years of observing how the man he now calls “the best president of my lifetime” 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.
He claimed he had rejected it.
“I’ve already turned down my appointment from the emperor,” Vance wrote — adding a winking emoji — after his interlocutor referred to the possibility of a government appointment by “Emperor Trump.” Pressed by his acquaintance about what job he had been offered, Vance replied, “I’m not going to say over twitter messenger.”
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.
The exchanges are further evidence of Vance’s 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.
Vance rose to fame in 2016 with his critically acclaimed memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy,” 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 — and as one of a minority of conservatives opposed to Trump, whom he described as “leading the white working class to a very dark place.”
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, “he actually honored his promises” in the White House.
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.
In their exchanges, Vance criticized the left in a way that aligns with his more recent public statements, worrying about “the woke stuff” and saying he believed progressive Democrats will inevitably be “coopted by financial elites.” 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.
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.
“I’m sympathetic to the idea that there’s a lot of long-term economic damage being done. But it’s always draped in this bizarre desire to pretend the virus itself isn’t a problem,” he wrote in May 2020.
The next year, as a Senate candidate, Vance denounced what he described as a “cabal” 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.
Martin, the Vance campaign spokesman, said, “Just like billions of other people all over the world, Sen. Vance’s views on COVID in May of 2020 were not the same as his views on the pandemic in 2021.”
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 “M4A,” as he called it, “is maybe a net positive, maybe not (details matter).”
Medicare-for-all, a plan in which the government would provide health insurance to every citizen — effectively replacing the private health insurance industry — 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 — including the Trump campaign — for once supporting the idea.
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 “risk pools.” 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.
Vance’s spokesman said the vice-presidential nominee now believes Medicare for All to be bad policy.
“Sen. Vance, like President Trump, doesn’t want people dying in the streets, but believes the details matter,” Martin said. “And the Democrats top-down Medicare for All plan would make healthcare worse for Americans.”
Vance’s judgment that Trump had “thoroughly failed to deliver on his economic populism” came in the context of a discussion of wealthy business executives — such as former New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg or former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi — running for office.
Vance said he doubted that Trump’s richest donors would abandon him in 2020 because he had continued to serve their interests as president, despite his populist rhetoric.
“Not sure any of these people feel like they need to switch sides,” he wrote.
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.
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.
“You’re playing a strategic game,” Vance wrote, “the same as me.”