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On Monday afternoon in Milwaukee, the guessing game ended as Donald Trump announced J.D. Vance as his 2024 vice-presidential running mate at the Republican National Convention.
Now, these days, the junior Republican senator from Ohio, elected in 2022, is a full-fledged Trump toady, denouncing the prosecution of the GOP presidential candidate in New York as a “sham trial” and praising Trump’s record as a “great president,” but he used to be a self-proclaimed “Never Trump guy” back in 2016.
I happened to interview him for a panel discussion on the threat posed by Trump on my old Al Jazeera English show, ‘UpFront,’ in September 2016, less than two months before the presidential election.
“He’s exploiting some of the racism that’s there, but he’s also exploiting people’s fears and pointing it in a direction that maybe they wouldn’t go on their own,” Vance told me, referring to Trump. “I think that he is leading people in a very dark direction.”
Today, Vance has joined Trump in “exploiting people’s fears” and “leading” them in that “very dark direction.” He is a proud part of the GOP 2024 presidential ticket.
For the 39-year-old Ohio senator, former venture capitalist, and best-selling author, it has been a remarkable - and remarkably shameless - transformation from “Never Trump guy” into Trump loyalist, Trump booster, and now, finally, Trump running mate.
I thought it might be useful to put together a list of damning quotes about Trump, from Vance, from 2016. He now claims he was “wrong about Donald Trump” and regrets his earlier attacks on the former president (and, as CNN’s Andrew Kaczynski and his colleagues have documented, he has since deleted many of his most critical tweets).
Nevertheless, as November fast approaches, Democrats may want to start using some of these old quotes from Vance in their anti-Trump attack ads. #justsayin