JD Vance has gone on a long journey from being a fervent critic of Donald Trump to his running mate and possible future vice-president.
The author of Hillbilly Elegy, a memoir of his upbringing among the left-behind white working class of Ohio, was viewed as giving a unique insight into the Trump voter base after the 2016 election. The book described the future president as “cultural heroin” and someone “leading the white working class to a very dark place”.
But during his primary run for an Ohio Senate seat in 2021, Vance transformed into a Make America Great Again true believer, winning Trump’s support, the Senate seat and now the vice-presidential nomination.
Here are some of Vance’s most memorable quotes from his decade in the public eye.
From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)
“Whenever people ask me what I’d most like to change about the white working class, I say: ‘The feeling that our choices don’t matter.’”
“Every two weeks I’d get a small pay-check and notice the line where federal and state income taxes were deducted from my wages. At least as often, our drug-addict neighbor would buy T-bone steaks, which I was too poor to buy for myself but was forced by Uncle Sam to buy for someone else.”
On race and the opioid epidemic
“There’s absolutely been a difference in a way I think the country has responded psychologically to the crack epidemic versus the opioid epidemic. So I think a lot of black Americans are completely justified in being sensitive about that fact.”
On Donald Trump
Feb 2016, private message to a friend:
“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.”
April 2016, the New York Times:
“Mr Trump is unfit for our nation’s highest office.”
“Trump brings power to those who hate their lack of it, and his message is tonic to communities that have felt nothing but decline for decades … 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 can’t stomach Trump. I think that he’s noxious and is leading the white working class to a very dark place.”
“I’m a never Trump guy. I never liked him.”
October 2016, now-deleted tweet:
“Trump makes people I care about afraid. Immigrants, Muslims, etc. Because of this I find him reprehensible. God wants better of us.”
March 2017, now-deleted tweet:
“In 4 years, I hope people remember that it was those of us who empathized with Trump’s voters who fought him the most aggressively.”
July 2021, confronted with past anti-Trump statements, CNN:
“Like a lot of people, I criticized Trump back in 2016. 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 in America if the facts change then you should change your mind and Trump was a good president.”
On abortion
“Two wrong don’t make a right … It’s not whether a woman should be forced to bring a child to term, it’s whether a child should be allowed to live, even though the circumstances of that child’s birth are somehow inconvenient or a problem to the society. The question to me is really about the baby. We want women to have opportunities, we want women to have choices, but, above all, we want women and young boys in the womb to have a right to life.”
“Ohio is going to want to have a different abortion policy from California, from New York, and I think that’s reasonable.”
“What Donald Trump has said, which is very consistent with what I said during my own campaign, is that the gross majority of abortion policy is gonna be made at the state level.”
On the Ukraine war
February 2022, Bannon’s War Room podcast:
“I think it’s ridiculous that we’re focused on this border in Ukraine. I’ve got to be honest with you, I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or the other.”
February 2024, Conservative Political Action Conference:
“I think that it is absurd for us to devote so many resources, so much attention and so much time to a border conflict 6,000 miles away when our own southern border is wide open. We’ve got to focus more on our problems close to home.”
On the ‘great replacement theory’, which claims white people are being deliberately replaced by ethnic minorities
“You’re talking about a shift in the democratic makeup of this country that would mean we never win, meaning Republicans would never win a national election in this country ever again.”
On the 6 January 2021 Capitol attack and the 2020 election
“These people are political prisoners, and their captivity is an assault on democracy.”
“I think the election was stolen from Trump.”
“If I had been vice-president, I would have told the states, like Pennsylvania, Georgia and so many others, that we needed to have multiple slates of electors and I think the US Congress should have fought over it from there. That is the legitimate way to deal with an election that a lot of folks, including me, think had a lot of problems in 2020. I think that’s what we should have done.”
“I’m extremely skeptical that Mike Pence’s life was ever in danger … I think, look, January 6th was a bad day. It was a riot. But the idea that Donald Trump endangered anyone’s lives, when he told them to protest peacefully, it’s just absurd.”
On the climate crisis
Oct 2021, American Leadership Forum:
“I’m skeptical of the idea that climate change is caused purely by man … It’s been changing, as others pointed out, it’s been changing for millennia.”
On the UK
July 2024, National Conservatism Conference:
“I was talking about, you know, what is the first truly Islamist country that will get a nuclear weapon, and we were like, maybe it’s Iran, you know, maybe Pakistan already kind of counts, and then we sort of finally decided maybe it’s actually the UK, since Labour just took over.”
July 2024, on Trump’s attempted assassination, X:
“Today is not just some isolated incident. The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs. That rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.”
