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Ohio junior senator and vice-presidential nominee JD Vance is a “hypocrite” who “sold his soul” and will unquestioningly help advance twice-impeached former president Donald Trump’s hard-right agenda if the pair manage to take the White House in November.
That’s according to attorney Josh McLaurin, who spoke to The Independent about his former Yale Law School roommate, now vying for the number two spot in American politics.
It only took a few years for the 39-year-old Vance to go from a so-called Never Trumper to be “not just a cheerleader for Trump, but to be arguably the nation’s biggest cheerleader for Trump,” McLaurin said on Wednesday. “There aren’t even really words.”
“I believe that he has adopted the MAGA mindset wholesale,” McLaurin said. “I think that he personally wants to see a lot more destruction of institutions and norms than your average elected Republican does. And I think that he’s allowing his deep-seated anger—and who cares where that anger is from—to motivate him to make this complete ideological conversion.”
When the two roomed together in 2010 and 2011, Vance was able to hold a contemplative conversation with peers, even peers he disagreed with, according to McLaurin, an Atlanta trial lawyer and Democrat elected to the Georgia statehouse in 2018.
“He’s obviously a very smart person,” McLaurin went on. “And he’s personable, one-on-one. But he has chosen to drink the Trump-era poison that the Republican Party has to offer, so that he can maximize his influence in the short run.”
A Vance spokesman did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Wednesday.
As the Republican National Convention kicked off Monday in Milwaukee, Trump announced Vance as his running mate. Shortly after the news broke, McLaurin roasted Vance in a post on X, the social network formerly known as Twitter: “I’m the guy JD Vance sent the ‘America’s Hitler’ text to in 2016… Obviously he’s a sellout, but the bigger deal is he’s angry and vindictive. The perfect fit for Trump’s revenge. JD’s rise is a triumph for angry jerks everywhere.”
McLaurin was referencing a text Vance sent him the month after Trump’s inauguration, which said, “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. How’s that for discouraging?” (Vance told Fox News host Sean Hannity on Tuesday that he had “changed my mind” after being impressed by what Trump did in office.)
The “everyman” character Vance—an Ohio native and former Marine Corps combat correspondent who has represented the Buckeye State in the U.S. Senate since 2023—portrays on the political stage in fact masks an ambition at odds with his carefully constructed public persona, according to McLaurin.
Despite his Ivy League pedigree, Vance wrote in his controversial 2016 memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, that he viewed “members of the elite with an almost primal scorn.” A vocal free marketeer and onetime Silicon Valley venture capitalist, Vance has eagerly accepted millions from Big Tech while publicly calling for the sector to be limited by regulators. And although Vance is now all-in on the only former president to have been convicted of a felony, he not long ago considered Trump, variously, an “idiot,” “noxious,” “reprehensible,” “the fruit of the party’s collective neglect,” “unfit,” and a “total fraud.”
Vance’s willingness to play both sides to suit his own needs demonstrates “the magnitude of this guy’s bad faith,” McLaurin said on social media in 2022, a sentiment he echoed on Wednesday, hours before Vance, who has changed his name multiple times over the years, is scheduled to give a prime-time address at the RNC.
McLaurin told The Independent that his first impression of Vance when they were matched up as roomies at Yale Law was a positive one.
“We roomed together because we thought we would get along,” McLaurin said, explaining that he and Vance, as well as their third apartment-mate, had been “state school guys.”
But as McLaurin dove headfirst into life at Yale Law, immersing himself in the academic community, he said he found Vance becoming more and more contemptuous of their privileged peers. Still, Vance knew “it didn’t pay, professionally, to unleash” those feelings openly, McLaurin continued.
“Trump has changed that,” said McLaurin. “He’s created a permission structure for politicians, and for everyday Americans… to be bullies. To try out contempt [and] see how it works. And I think it has really worked for JD.”
As McLaurin “progressively watched [Vance] get Trumpier over the years,” he found himself feeling “dismayed,” then “utterly disappointed” upon Trump’s endorsement of Vance for U.S. Senate in 2022. He had saved the text conversation he’d had with Vance about Trump’s similarities to Hitler, and struggled with the notion of exposing the exchange.
Ultimately, McLaurin explained, Vance’s glowing acceptance of the endorsement from Trump was what prompted him to release the texts.
“At that point, it was a matter of national public concern,” he said. “And it just outweighed my discomfort… In this one case, I made a calculation that it was a big enough deal, and a big enough reversal…that I felt a duty to publish it.”
By accepting a key role “in the Trump moment,” according to McLaurin, Vance “has chosen a very destructive path.”
“Just because he’s capable of insight and thoughtfulness doesn’t mean that he can be trusted to exercise it,” McLaurin said. “... What good are your thoughtfulness and your principles if you’ve created enough of a monster through your rhetoric that those principles don’t matter anymore?”
Vance is set to live-tweet his thoughts on Vance’s speech this evening at the RNC.
