Everything J.D. Vance Has Said Against Donald Trump, His 2024 Presidential Election Running Mate

Ohio senator J.D. Vance was one of the most prominent "Never Trump" Republicans before requesting Donald Trump's endorsement in his senate race

J.D. Vance, the junior Ohio senator just named as Donald J. Trump's pick to run on his ticket as the Republican vice presidential candidate, is now one of the most vocal supporters of the former president. But it was not long ago that he had established himself as a strong opponent to Trump's policies, even referring to him as, potentially, "America's Hitler."

Around the time of the 2016 presidential race, Vance had just gained notoriety for his book Hillbilly Elegy, based on his own experiences of growing up in America's impoverished Rust Belt. Many people felt it gave insight into the growing economic discontent in the country, and Vance was given a platform on behalf of conservatives who repudiated Trump's incendiary rhetoric and divisive language.

In the years since, Vance has pursued an extremely conservative path in his effort to seek Trump's endorsement in his 2022 race for Ohio senator. He adopted hard-right MAGA values, including election denial; he has indicated that, unlike Trump's former vice president Mike Pence, he would have allowed Congress to consider fraudulent slates of electors for the 2020 election, and would suggest that Trump "fire every civil servant in the administrative state and replace them with our people." He also has espoused some of the tenets of Project 2025, including making it more difficult to access divorce.

By the time of a midterms rally in 2022, Vance had come around enough for Trump to say, “He’s a guy that said some bad s--- about me. But I have to do what I have to do [by endorsing him for Senate]. We have to pick somebody that can win.”

Related: Who Is J. D. Vance's Wife? All About Usha Chilukuri Vance

So what had Vance said about Trump in the past?

In April of 2016, he wrote in the New York Times that Trump was "unfit for our nation’s highest office."

He went even further in a July 2016 opinion piece for The Atlantic, titled "An Opioid for the Masses," Vance wrote of Trump's big campaign promises, "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 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."

"I'm a Never Trump guy," Vance said in an interview with Charlie Rose in 2016, according to Politico. "I never liked him."

As Trump continued to campaign, Vance amped up the messaging, warning on NPR that Trump was “leading the white working class to a very dark place," with campaign promises that ranged from "immoral to absurd" (as he wrote in USA Today).

He wrote on Twitter (and has since deleted) posts that called Trump "reprehensible" and condemned him for fomenting fear and division. In another since-deleted Twitter post used against him by his senate race opponents, he wrote of Trump, "My god what an idiot."

Related: J.D. Vance's 3 Kids: All About Ewan, Vivek and Mirabel

And he sent his former law school roommate a private message on Facebook, which was shared at the time of the 2022 midterms, saying, in part (per the Ohio Capital Journal), "I go 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."

A spokesperson for Vance, Jordan Wiggins, responded to the screenshot by saying, “It’s laughable that the media treats J.D. not liking Trump six years ago as some sort of breaking news, when they’ve already covered it to death since this race began. Clearly, President Trump trusts that J.D. is a genuine convert.”

Said Vance while campaigning in 2022, “I’m not gonna hide from the fact that I did not see Trump’s promise in the beginning but you know, he delivered."

For more People news, make sure to sign up for our newsletter!

Read the original article on People.