Downward angle icon. Downward angle icon. Years before Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance became Donald Trump’s running mate, he spoke out against the former president and hated the police, according to emails published by The New York Times. Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images The New York Times obtained old email correspondence between J.D. Vance and his former Yale classmates. The emails show that Vance was ideologically different from his predecessor, before he supported Donald Trump. Vance had previously spoken out against the police and condemned the Republican Party’s embrace of Trump.
Years before Sen. J.D. Vance endorsed Donald Trump as his vice presidential candidate, according to a New York Times exposé, the Ohio senator appeared to be expressing views of a different ideological bent.
The emails show Vance, who had not yet decided whether to run for Senate, writing to a classmate, Sophia Nelson, a public defender in Detroit. Nelson, who is also transgender, told The Times that the two had a falling out after Vance said he supported an Arkansas law banning gender-affirming medical treatment for minors that was overturned by a federal judge last year.
According to the New York Times, the letters between Nelson and Vance were written primarily between 2014 and 2017.
In it, Vance denounced the Republican Party’s support for Trump, called the former president a “morally reprehensible man” and expressed disappointment in law enforcement following the 2014 killing of 18-year-old Michael Brown.
“I love the body camera movement and anything that brings policing back to a culture of service and protection rather than control and coercion,” Vance wrote to Nelson in 2014, according to The New York Times. “I hate the police, and given the number of bad experiences I’ve had over the past few years, I can’t imagine what it must be like for black people.”
In a statement to Business Insider and shared with the paper, Luke Schroeder, a spokesman for Vance, said it was “disappointing” that Nelson would leak “private conversations between friends from a decade ago” to The New York Times.
“Senator Vance values friendships with people across the political spectrum. He freely admits that becoming a father and starting a family has changed his views from 10 years ago, and he has detailed why he now thinks differently about President Trump,” Schroeder told business magazine BI. “Despite their differences, Senator Vance cares about Sophia and genuinely wants her well-being.”
Other emails published by the Times provide further evidence that Vance has switched from being a Never Trumper to being a MAGA supporter.
In 2015, Vance wrote that he was “clearly outraged by Trump’s comments” and likened him to a demagogue who “exploits people who believe crazy things.”
“The more white people want to vote for Trump, the more black people will suffer,” he wrote in 2016.
“I truly believe that,” he added.
Since Vance was selected as Trump’s running mate in July, some of his past comments about the former president have been resurrected online, with some of them being used by Kamala Harris’ campaign to undermine her candidacy.
In a 2016 recording shared by the Harris campaign, Vance can be heard saying, “I think Trump is a really bad candidate and, frankly, a really bad person.”
In a 2016 text message to another Yale classmate, Vance wondered whether Trump could become “the American Hitler.”
A few years later, when he launched his Senate campaign in 2021, Vance’s tone toward Trump changed dramatically.
The then-senatorial candidate repeated Trump’s baseless claims about election fraud and told Fox News in July 2021 that he regretted criticizing Trump.
“Like many people, I criticized Trump in 2016,” he told Fox News. “Please don’t judge me for what I said in 2016, because I’ve been open about saying critical things and I regret those things and I regret being wrong about Trump.”
By April 2022, President Trump had endorsed Vance for the Senate.
“JD is all over me. He wants my support,” Trump said at a 2022 rally in Ohio, responding to a Times article about the reluctance of Republican candidates, including Vance, to invite the former president to their rallies. “Yeah, he said bad things about me, but that was before he got to know me, and then he fell in love.”