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[COMMENTARY] JD Vance Says He ‘Regrets’ His Anti-Trump Tweets Now That He’s Running for a GOP Seat

BY July 6, 2021

JD Vance, the controversial author of the not-quite-a-memoir “Hillbilly Elegy” author has apologized for a former political position: critic of Donald Trump.

Vance is a former US Marine and venture capitalist who has attracted strong backing from right-wing tech billionaire Peter Thiel. He announced his run for Senate in Ohio last week. “Hillbilly Elegy” was a bestseller in 2016 that was made into a widely-panned movie for Netflix despite the acting nominations it garnered for its two leads, Amy Adams and Glenn Close. Vance wrote of the chaos that can haunt a family with generational memory of deep poverty, but it was later revealed that he had embellished several passages of his book to make his family situation seem worse than it actually was.

JD Vance

The dubiously honored author-turned-Republican Senate candidate appeared on Fox News on Monday and began his apology tour with a statement that fits right in with his opportunistic default settings. “Like a lot of people, I criticized Trump back in 2016,” Vance told Fox News on Monday. “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.”

And yet last week, deleted tweets from 2016 unearthed by CNN showed Vance calling Trump’s views on immigrants and Muslims “reprehensible” and saying he would vote for Evan McMullin, an independent conservative.

But Vance didn’t just keep his criticisms to tweets. In 2016, Vance wrote in USA Today that “Trump’s actual policy proposals, such as they are, range from immoral to absurd.” He also called Trump “cultural heroin,” who “makes some feel better for a bit,” in a piece that year for The Atlantic.

A possible opponent in the 2022 Ohio Senate race, the Democratic congressman Tim Ryan, tweeted that he and Vance “have exactly one thing in common – neither of us voted for Donald Trump”. But Vance told Fox News that he regrets being “wrong” about Trump all along.

“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 he was a good president, I think he made a lot of good decisions for people and I think he took a lot of flak,” Vance said on camera where other people could hear him, and those people all rolled their eyes at once and yelled “Riiiight” at the screen.

From now on, the only good part of JD Vance running for office will be the Twitter dragging. It’s definitely more entertaining than the hunk of celluloid crap they made from his book of Appalachian lies.



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