AP Photo/Jeff Dean
- On Monday, a 2016 Facebook message by Trump-endorsed Senate hopeful JD Vance was leaked.
- In the message, Vance said Trump might either be an “asshole” like Nixon, or “America’s Hitler.”
- Vance was endorsed on Friday by Trump for his Senate run in Ohio.
JD Vance, an Ohio Republican Senate hopeful backed by former President Donald Trump, once told his college roommate that he thought Trump might be “America’s Hitler.”
On Monday, Georgia Rep. Josh McLaurin tweeted an image of a lengthy Facebook message sent to him by Vance in 2016.
In the message, Vance 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?” added the “Hillbilly Elegy” author, who shared a room with McLaurin during their first year at Yale Law School.
The message began with Vance saying that he was “not surprised by Trump’s rise” and that the Republic Party had “only itself to blame” for it.
“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,” he added.
—Josh McLaurin (@JoshforGeorgia) April 18, 2022
In his tweet, McLaurin said Vance’s message was essentially an “unfiltered explanation” of the “breakdown in Republican politics that he now personally is trying to exploit.”
“The public deserves to know the magnitude of this guy’s bad faith,” he added.
Vance did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Insider. However, a spokesperson for Vance told Newsweek that the text was “old news” and that Vance is “proud to have President Trump’s support.”
“Clearly, President Trump trusts that JD is a genuine convert, as out of all the Republican candidates running, he endorsed JD and concluded that he is the strongest America First conservative in the race,” said Vance’s spokesperson per the outlet.
Vance was once known to be anti-Trump but is now a supporter of the former president. In April, Ohio Republicans urged Trump not to back Vance for the Senate, asking that he pick a less risky candidate to endorse.
However, Trump persisted in his endorsement of Vance, which was announced on April 15.
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