His past hostility to Trump should have been disqualifying for an endorsement
Nixon or Hitler! That’s quite a choice.
So why did Trump endorse this man? Well, he has turned groveling for Trump into an art form.
J.D. Vance, a venture capitalist and best-selling author who last week entered the Republican primary for Ohio’s open Senate seat in 2022, apologized for criticizing former President Donald Trump in now-deleted tweets.In deleted tweets first discovered by CNN’s KFile, Vance wrote in 2016 that he would not vote for Trump in the presidential election and instead] support Evan McMullin, a former CIA operations officer who ran as an independent. Vance also called Trump “reprehensible.””Trump makes people I care about afraid. Immigrants, Muslims, etc. Because of this I find him reprehensible. God wants better of us,” he wrote in October 2016.
In another deleted tweet — this one sent following the fallout of the infamous Access Hollywood tape — Vance wrote, “Fellow Christians, everyone is watching us when we apologize for this man. Lord help us.”
And in a tweet from March 2017, he wrote, “In 4 years, I hope people remember that it was those of us who empathized with Trump’s voters who fought him the most aggressively.”
On Fox News on Monday night, Vance said he regretted making his earlier comments and asked viewers not to judge him on his past statements.”Like a lot of people, I criticized Trump back in 2016,” Vance said. “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.”Vance added that he thought Trump was a good president and that “he made a lot of good decisions for people, and I think he took a lot of flak.”
Here’s one esigned to make Trump swoon:
Trump understands something very important. It is actually more powerful to have people who once opposed you grovelling and apologizing, especially when they do it publicly. That demonstrates dominance which, as we know, Trump considers to be the essence of leadership.
Vance is sort-of a celebrity which Trump sees as the most important attribute any would-be politician can have. I’m sure that guides his belief that Vance “can win.” But really, he is just rewarding the grotesque genuflecting of a former critic. He likes that. A lot.