Trump-Endorsed Candidate JD Vance Once Said Trump Might Be America's Hitler' (2022)
www.vice.com
... Former President Donald Trump's newest Senate endorsee was even less of a Trump fan than he'd publicly let on.
Back in 2016, during his #NeverTrump phase, Ohio Senate candidate and Hillbilly Elegy author JD Vance said Trump was either a "cynical [anal-pore]" or "America's Hitler" in a private message to an old law school classmate.
It's no secret that Vance, who won the coveted Trump endorsement last weekend, wasn't a Trump fan back then -- he publicly mocked Trump all year and refused to vote for him in the 2016 general election, and publicly called him "noxious," "reprehensible," and an "idiot" in October 2016.
But Vance went even further rhetorically in a private Facebook message he sent to Josh McLaurin, Vance's old Yale Law School roommate, when McLaurin reached out to ask for his take on the GOP primary in February 2016.
"I think most people are not very ideological, and Trump, while I find him loathsome, touches a legitimate nerve. You should read David Frum's piece in the Atlantic on the Republican revolt.
But I'm not surprised by Trump's rise, and I think the entire party has only itself to blame," Vance messaged McLaurin. "We are, whether we like it or not, the party of lower-income, lower-education white people, and I have been saying for a long time that we need to offer those people SOMETHING (and hell, maybe even expand our appeal to working-class black people in the process) or a demagogue would.
We are now at that point. Trump is the fruit of the party's collective neglect."
Vance then said Trump was either like disgraced former President Richard Nixon"or Nazi leader Adolph Hitler.
"I go back and forth between thinking Trump is a cynical [anal-pore] like Nixon who wouldn't be that bad (and might even prove useful) or that he's America's Hitler. How's that for discouraging?" Vance concludes, before asking McLaurin how his work was going. ....
