Ohio Senate candidate J.D. Vance questioned whether Trump is like Hitler in 2016 message
Haley BeMiller
U.S. Senate candidate J.D. Vance appeared to ponder whether former President Donald Trump is similar to Adolf Hitler in a newly surfaced Facebook message from 2016.
Screenshots provided to USA TODAY Network Ohio show Vance discussing Trump's 2016 presidential election bid with Josh McLaurin, a Georgia state representative who said he lived with Vance for a year during their time at Yale Law School. McLaurin reached out in February 2016 to ask his former roommate about the state of the GOP.
"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," Vance wrote. "How's that for discouraging?"
McLaurin shared screenshots of the exchange, along with messages from 2010 that indicate the two had a living arrangement with a third roommate. Vance and McLaurin are still friends on Facebook.
McLaurin, a Democrat, published the message on Twitter just days after Trump endorsed Vance in the crowded GOP primary to replace retiring Sen. Rob Portman. Vance previously called the former president "noxious" and difficult to stomach but has since embraced Trump and said he was wrong.
In his 2016 message to McLaurin, Vance said Trump's rise wasn't surprising and blamed the GOP for allowing it to happen.
"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," Vance wrote. "We are now at that point. Trump is the fruit of the party's collective neglect."
Vance's past on Trump
Vance's rivals in the Senate race have repeatedly criticized his past comments, and some Ohio Republicans made a last-ditch effort to persuade Trump not to back Vance when news of the endorsement leaked. But the former president made up his mind and plans to host Vance at a rally in Delaware County on Saturday.
"Like some others, J.D. Vance may have said some not-so-great things about me in the past, but he gets it now, and I have seen that in spades," Trump wrote.
In a statement, Vance campaign manager Jordan Wiggins cast the comments as "old news."
"It's laughable that the media treats J.D. not liking Trump 6 years ago as some sort of breaking news, when they’ve already covered it to death since this race began," Wiggins said. "Clearly, President Trump trusts that J.D. is a genuine convert, as out of all the Republican candidates running, he endorsed J.D. and concluded that he is the strongest America First conservative in the race."
McLaurin said he and Vance were never close, but he valued Vance's perspective and believed the venture capitalist could help remake the Republican Party. He also thought Vance found a "fitting moment for his story" when he published "Hillbilly Elegy" months before the 2016 election.
Over time, though, McLaurin said he became more alarmed with Vance's politics and contends he's a hypocrite for aligning himself with Trump.
"He has adopted a destructive approach to politics that is centered primarily on distrust of opposition, fear of the other," McLaurin said. "I think that he has basically hollowed himself out as a person."
Haley BeMiller is a reporter for the USA TODAY Network Ohio Bureau, which serves the Columbus Dispatch, Cincinnati Enquirer, Akron Beacon Journal and 18 other affiliated news organizations across Ohio.