“I think Trump will probably lose,” Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, wrote in June 2020, just months before he would then falsely claim that the loss he predicted was the product of voter fraud, The Washington Post reported Friday.
Citing previously unrevealed direct messages that Vance sent before his Senate run, the Post noted that Donald Trump's latest running mate had remained privately critical of the former president even after publicly backing him. Despite predicting his loss, Vance has since doubled down on baseless claims of theft, saying he would have refused to certify the 2020 election had he been vice president.
“Trump has just so thoroughly failed to deliver on his economic populism (excepting a disjointed China policy),” Vance wrote in one such message, sent in February 2020.
Vance has always explained his flip-flopping on the GOP presidential nominee by claiming Trump's record as president changed his mind, transforming him from a "Never Trump" conservative to someone willing to campaign alongside a man he'd previously warned could be "America's Hitler."
The private messages that Vance sent via X, obtained by the Post, reveal that even as he was praising Trump on television, he was telling others that he was a failure.
In a statement, a spokesperson for Vance claimed his damning criticism of Trump was consistent with his support for the former president. Per the spokesperson, "establishment Republicans" were to blame for having "thwarted much of Trump's populist economic agenda to increase tariffs and boost domestic manufacturing in Congress."
