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The New York Times obtained old email correspondence between JD Vance and his former Yale classmate.
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The emails reveal an ideologically different Vance from a time before he embraced Donald Trump.
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Vance once said he hates the police and denounced the Republican Party’s embrace of Trump.
Years before JD Vance embraced Donald Trump and became his running mateThe Ohio senator appeared to express views of a different ideological bent, according to email correspondence with the politician’s former classmate at Yale University, published by The New York Times.
The emails show Vance, who had not yet run for Senate, writing to his classmate Sofia Nelson, a Detroit public defender. Nelson, who is also transgender, told the Times that the two fell out after Vance said she supported a Arkansas ban on gender-affirming care for minors. The law was overturned by a federal judge last year.
Correspondence between Nelson and Vance dates mostly from 2014 to 2017, the Times reported.
In them, Vance denounced the Republican Party’s embrace of Trump, calling the former president a “morally reprehensible human being” and expressed disappointment with law enforcement following the murder of michael browna young black man aged 18, in 2014.
“I love him body camera movement, and anything that puts police officers back into the mindset of service and protection rather than control and coercion,” Vance wrote to Nelson in 2014, the Times reported. “I hate the police. Given the amount of negative experiences I’ve had in recent years, I can’t imagine what a black person goes through.”
Luke Schroeder, Vance’s spokesman, said in a statement to Business Insider that was also shared with the Times that it was “unfortunate” that Nelson leaked “a decade’s worth of private conversations between friends to The New York Times.”
“Senator Vance values his friendships with individuals across the political spectrum. He has been open about the fact that some of his views from a decade ago began to change after becoming a father and starting a family, and he has explained in detail why he changed his mind on President Trump,” Schroeder told BI. “Despite the odds differences, Senator Vance cares about Sofia and wishes Sofia the best.”
Other emails published by the Times show further evidence of Vance’s well-known shift from a Never Trumper for a MAGA loyalist.
In 2015, Vance wrote that he was “obviously outraged by Trump’s rhetoric”, comparing him to a demagogue “willing to exploit people who believe crazy shit”.
He also wrote in 2016 that “the more white people feel like voting for Trump, the more black people will suffer.
“I really believe that,” he added.
How Vance was chosen as Trump’s running mate in July, the old senator comments about the former president have resurfaced online — some of which were used by Kamala Harris’ campaign to undermine Trump’s candidacy.
“Trump is a terrible candidate and, frankly, I think he is a very bad person,” Vance can be heard saying in a 2016 recording shared by the Harris campaign.
In a text message to another former Yale classmate in 2016, Vance wondered if Trump might be “America’s Hitler.”
Years later, when he launched his 2021 Senate campaign, Vance’s tone toward Trump changed radically.
The then-hopeful Senate began repeating Trump’s baseless claims of voter fraud, and in July 2021 told Fox News that it regretted criticizing Trump.
“Like many people, I criticized Trump in 2016,” he told Fox News. “And I ask people not to judge me based on what I said in 2016, because I was very open in saying these critical things, and I regret them, and I regret being wrong about the guy.”
In April 2022, Trump endorsed Vance for the Senate.
“JD is kissing my ass, he wants my support,” Trump said at a rally in Ohio in 2022, in response to a Times story about Republican candidates, including Vance, who were reluctant to invite the former president to rallies. “Yes, he said some bad things about me, but that was before he met me and then fell in love.”
Read the original article at Business Insider
