CBS Questions Vance About How He Went From Calling Trump ‘Hitler’ to Being His Running Mate
CBS vice presidential debate moderator Margaret Brennan asked JD Vance how he went from comparing former President Donald Trump to Adolf Hitler to being Trump’s running mate.
During Tuesday’s CBS debate between Vance and Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Walz, Brennan asked:
Senator Vance, in 2016 you called your running mate Donald Trump unfit for the nation’s highest office and you said he could be America’s Hitler. I know you’ve said, you’ve been asked many times, and you’ve said you regret those comments and explained you then voted for Donald Trump in 2020, but the Washington Post reported new messages last week in which you also disparaged Trump’s economic record while he was president, writing to someone in 2020, quote, “Trump thoroughly failed to deliver his economic populism.” You’re now his running mate and you’ve shifted many of your policy stances to align with his. If you become vice president, why should Americans trust that you will give Donald Trump the advice he needs to hear, and not just the advice he wants to hear?
Vance replied, “Well first of all, Margaret, I’ve always been open and sometimes, of course, I’ve disagreed with the president, but I’ve also been extremely open about the fact that I was wrong about Donald Trump.”
He continued:
I was wrong, first of all, because I believed some of the media stories that turned out to be dishonest fabrications of his record, but most importantly Donald Trump delivered for the American people, rising wages, rising take-home pay, an economy that worked for normal Americans, a secure southern border – a lot of things, frankly, that I didn’t think he’d be able to deliver on. And yeah, when you screw up, when you misspeak, when you get something wrong and you change your mind, you ought to be honest with the American people about it. It’s one of the reasons, Margaret, why I’ve done so many interviews, is because I think it’s important to actually explain to the American people where I come down on the issues and what changed.
Now, you pointed out the messages from 2020. Margaret, I’ve been extremely consistent that I think there were a lot of things that we could have done better in the Trump administration the first round if Congress was doing its job. I strongly believe, and I’ve been a United States senator, that Congress is not just a high-class debating society. It’s not just a forum for senators and congressmen to whine about problems, it’s a forum to govern. So there were a lot of things on the border, on tariffs, for example, where I think that we could have done so much more if the Republican Congress and the Democrats in Congress had been a little bit better about how they govern the country. They were so obsessed with impeaching Donald Trump, they couldn’t actually govern.
Vance was a vocal critic of Trump in 2016, writing in a 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.”
The Republican vice presidential nominee also compared Trump to “cultural heroin” and liked social media posts accusing the former president of “serial sexual assault,” before changing his mind about Trump in 2020.
Watch above via CBS.
