Ohio Republican Senate candidate J.D. Vance is happily touting his new endorsement from former President Donald Trump — even though he once wondered whether Trump is “America’s Hitler,” according to a Georgia state lawmaker who attended law school with Vance.
“It is time for the entire MAGA movement ... to unite behind J.D.’s campaign,” Trump said last week about the venture capitalist and “Hillbilly Elegy” author who has never held public office.
Vance is featuring the endorsement in a new statewide campaign ad — even though he once railed against Trump as “noxious” and an “idiot.”
But the most damning dig to surface is Vance’s apparent comparison of Trump to Adolf Hitler (and Richard Nixon).
Vance’s onetime Yale Law School roommate, Democratic Georgia state Rep. Josh McLaurin, posted a 2016 Facebook message from Vance on Twitter to expose the “magnitude of this guy’s bad faith,” McLaurin tweeted.
According to the message, Vance bashed Trump as the “fruit” of the Republican Party’s “collective neglect” and added: “I go back and forth to thinking Trump is a cynical asshole like Nixon ... or that he’s America’s Hitler. How’s that for discouraging?”
“I can’t believe how cynical he has become,” McLaurin described Vance to Vice News, which reported that it had reviewed evidence the two were law school roommates and that the messages were authentic. “The public deserves to know also, so we can stop picking leaders who have so much disdain for the people they represent.”
Vance’s new campaign ad touts him as the “conservative outsider who will continue Trump’s fight to secure our borders, protect the unborn, get rid of the corrupt politicians and stop Joe Biden” — and heavily features news coverage of Trump’s endorsement.
Vance also received an endorsement from Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, whom he defended for attending and speaking at a white nationalist conference last month, declaring that “she did nothing wrong. I’m not going to throw her under the bus.”
Vance’s campaign didn’t deny that Vance wrote the messages, but scoffed that 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.” The mention of Hitler apparently didn’t merit any new level of concern.
Vance isn’t commenting on his past remarks about Trump, but others piled on.