JD Vance, in 2020 messages, said Trump ‘thoroughly failed to deliver’

In the direct messages — sent during Trump’s final year in office to an acquaintance over the social media platform then known as Twitter — Vance harshly criticized his future running mate’s record of governance and said Trump had not fulfilled his economic agenda.

“Trump has just so thoroughly failed to deliver on his economic populism (except a disjointed China policy),” Vance wrote in February 2020.

He also offered a prediction: Joe Biden, he believed, was going to win the 2020 election.

“I think Trump will probably lose,” he wrote in a message in June 2020, a few months before ballots were cast in an election that Vance would later claim, falsely and repeatedly, was stolen by the Democrats.

The critical messages, shared with the Post by their recipient on the condition of anonymity because of concerns about retaliation, cast doubt on Vance’s oft-recited account of how and when he embraced Trumpism. They were written years after Vance’s previously reported remarks attacking Trump, such as his statements in 2016 that Trump was “reprehensible,” “cultural heroin,” and possibly “America’s Hitler.”

In a statement, Vance spokesperson William Martin said Vance’s 2020 assessment of Trump’s failure to deliver on his economic policies was not meant as a criticism of the former president, but of “establishment Republicans who thwarted much of Trump’s populist economic agenda to increase tariffs and boost domestic manufacturing in Congress.”

Martin added, “Fortunately, Sen. Vance believes that Republicans in Congress are much more aligned with President Trump’s agenda today than they were back then, so he is confident that they won’t run into those same issues within the party.”

Vance’s campaign did not respond to questions about his prediction that Trump would lose the 2020 election.

While Martin said Vance recalled the 2020 exchanges, he criticized the Post for not identifying the person who disclosed the messages and for not sharing with the campaign the entirety of the conversation, portions of which were withheld to protect the person’s anonymity. Martin said the Post was engaged in “nothing more than unethical journalism.”

Vance has never pinpointed a moment when he became a fully committed Trump supporter, instead describing a gradual conversion away from his earlier views that was complete by the end of Trump’s first term. He says he was moved “to change my tune about President Trump from 2016 to 2020″ and that he voted for Trump in 2020. He has sought to isolate his critiques of Trump to a chapter of his life that is now in the distant past.

“Like a lot of people, I criticized Trump back in 2016,” Vance said shortly after he began campaigning for Senate in 2021. “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. 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.”

But the messages show that Vance still took a dim view of Trump’s achievements long after 2016 — and after almost four years of observing how the man he now calls “the best president of my lifetime” behaved in office. In fact, during the same June 2020 exchange when he said Trump was likely to lose the upcoming election, Vance seemed to suggest he had been offered a position in the Trump administration.

He claimed he had rejected it.

“I’ve already turned down my appointment from the emperor,” Vance wrote — adding a winking emoji — after his interlocutor referred to the possibility of a government appointment by “Emperor Trump.” Pressed by his acquaintance about what job he had been offered, Vance replied, “I’m not going to say over twitter messenger.”

Neither Trump nor Vance has ever disclosed that he was offered a role working for Trump before he was selected as the GOP vice-presidential nominee in July. The Vance campaign did not address questions about whether Vance had been offered a job.

The exchanges are further evidence of Vance’s penchant for engaging in prolific and sometimes incautious dialogues with digital pen pals, including a 20-month texting conversation with the far-right blogger and conspiracy theorist Charles Johnson.