This Pro-Trump Candidate Once Called Ex-POTUS ‘America’s Hitler’

A pro-Trump Senate candidate had previously raised concerns that former President Donald Trump could be “America’s Hitler,” according to his former college roommate.

Ohio Senate candidate J.D. Vance, the author of “Hillbilly Elegy,” had spoken about Trump in a text message sent to his former Yale University roommate Rep. Josh McLaurin, D-Ga., in 2016.

“We are, whether we like it or not, the party of lower-income, lower-education white people,” Vance wrote in the text message, according to a tweet McLaurin posted Thursday. "I go back and forth between thinking Trump is a cynical a--hole like Nixon who wouldn't be that bad (and might even prove useful) or that he's America's Hitler."

The Georgia Democrat said the conversation stemmed from a discussion about Republican politics. He added that the text message showed the magnitude of Vance’s “bad faith.”

The release of the text message comes after the former president publicly endorsed Vance in Ohio’s GOP Senate primary Friday despite the candidate’s prior history of being Trump’s critic.

"Like some others, J.D. Vance may have said some not so great things about me in the past, but he gets it now," the former President said in a statement. "In the Great State of Ohio, the candidate most qualified and ready to win in November is J.D. Vance. We cannot play games. It is all about winning.”

In 2016, Vance called himself a “Never Trump guy” and referred to the former president as “an idiot” during an interview with American journalist Charlie Rose, as reported by POLITICO.

In September of the same year, Vance appeared in an interview with Aljazeera’s Mehdi Hasan where he accused Trump of “exploiting racism” and “people’s fears.” The Ohio senate candidate added that the former president was leading Americans “in a very dark direction.”

However, in a 2021 interview with Time magazine, Vance said he came around Trump, who he said was the “leader of this movement.”

“If I actually care about these people and the things I say I care about, I need to just suck it up and support him," Vance added.

Vance is scheduled to campaign with the former president’s son, Don Jr., in a town hall-style forum in Independence, Ohio, on Wednesday afternoon.