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JD Vance once penned a furious blog post sharing his disdain for the Republican party’s hostility toward immigrants – then urged his professor to delete it years later as he sought to enter politics.
As a 28-year-old Yale law student back in November 2012, the Ohio senator wrote an article titled: “A Blueprint for the GOP.”
In it, the more youthful and progressive Vance slammed Republicans for being “tone deaf” on immigration and “openly hostile to non-whites.”
Now, more than a decade later, as Donald Trump’s running mate, he has been accused of amplifying this same anti-immigrant rhetoric – most recently pushing false claims about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio.
“When the 2008 election was called for Obama, I remember thinking: maybe this will teach my party some very important lessons,” Vance began in the 2012 post, which still sits on the internet archive, Wayback Machine.
“You can’t actively alienate every growing bloc of the American electorate – Blacks, Latinos, the youth – and you can’t depend solely on the single shrinking bloc of the electorate – Whites.”
Later in his article, in a section titled “The Elephant in the Room – Demographics,” Vance addresses the GOP’s so-called inability to connect with immigrants.
He also described the Republicans’s immigration policy to deport 12 million people as nonsensical, adding it “failed to pass the laugh test”.
“To win, the Republicans must turn the tide with non-White voters,” he added. “Republicans lose minority voters for simple and obvious reasons: their policy proposals are tired, unoriginal, or openly hostile to non-Whites.”
He continued: “On immigration, Republicans are similarly tone deaf. I became a conservative in large part because I felt that the Right was far more honest about the real state of the world.”
Four years later, Vance called on his college professor to delete the blog post, CNN reported.
Professor Brad Nelson, who described Vance as one of his brightest students, obliged and took down the entry from the website Center for World Conflict and Peace, to give Vance the best chance of carving a path in Republican politics in 2016.
At that time, Vance was still a staunch critic of Trump.
“There are, undoubtedly, vile racists at the core of Trump’s movement,” Vance wrote on Facebook that year.
In private messages sent to a friend the same year, Vance denounced the former president as “America’s Hitler,” a “moral disaster” and “cultural heroin.”
Rather than voting for Trump or his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton in 2016, the Ohio senator said that he planned to vote for independent candidate Evan McMullin.
Fast forward to 2024 and the 40-year-old Republican vice presidential pick has adopted many of the anti-immigrant principles he once stood against.
A day before Trump faced off against Kamala Harris at the presidential debate in Philadelphia on September 10, Vance took to X to perpetuate a baseless rumor: that Haitian migrants were kidnapping and devouring pets in Springfield.
After local officials debunked the conspiracy theory, Vance appeared to admit it was made-up, telling CNN on Sunday that he has to “create stories” in order to get the media to “pay attention to the suffering of the American people.”
Vance also continues to push the rhetoric that the “flood” of millions of “illegal aliens” into the US is bad for the country – with the Biden administration’s border policy one of his most favored attack lines against so-called “border czar” Harris.
If elected, Trump has vowed to carry out the “largest deportation effort” of undocumented people in US history.
