Though you would never know it today, before he was selected as Donald Trump’s vice presidential running mate, J.D. Vance repeatedly called out Trump and the Republican Party’s politics of racism.
However, years later, the U.S. senator from Ohio emerged as a carbon copy of the former president based on his many views, including those about race. Critics who spoke with theGrio slammed Vance for his duplicity, noting that when it became politically expedient, he adopted the very ideologies of Trump he once denounced.
“He ran on brazen white nationalism,” said Reecie Colbert, a political commentator and host of Sirius XM’s “The Reecie Colbert Show.” She added, “He made a calculation, which turned out to be correct, that by going all in with the white nationalist party, he was going to go further.”
In 2016, Vance told PBS Newshour, “There is definitely an element of Donald Trump’s support that has its basis in racism.” According to CNN, in another interview, the Yale Law School graduate said, “Race is definitely a part of the Trump phenomenon.”
“The Trump people are certainly more racist than the average white professional,” Vance told POLITICO that same year. The “Hillbilly Elegy” author, who at the time was embraced as a sort of sage for white poor and working-class Americans, warned that Trump’s rhetoric would cause white people to “become more racist over time.”
Vance’s calling out of Trump on his perceived racism was seen as a refreshing conservative take amid years of racially tinged attacks on America’s first Black president, Barack Obama, which became a party norm. However, six years later, when he ran for the U.S. Senate in 2022, trailing his opponents in a crowded primary, a new J.D. Vance emerged.
In a campaign ad, Vance appeared to embrace elements of the “Great Replacement Theory,” a white nationalist far-right conspiracy theory that Black and brown people are replacing white Americans. The theory was embraced by domestic terrorists who committed mass shootings of Black Americans, including the 2022 grocery store shooting in Buffalo, N.Y., and the 2023 Dollar General store shooting in Jacksonville, Fla.
“Are you a racist? Do you hate Mexicans? The media calls us racists for wanting to build Trump’s wall,” Vance, who earned the endorsement of Trump, said in a campaign ad. “They censor us. But it doesn’t change the truth: Joe Biden’s open border is killing Ohioans with more illegal drugs and more Democrat voters pouring into this country.”
Colbert, noting Vance’s espousing of the Great Replacement Theory and support for the anti-Black Lives Matter shooter Kyle Rittenhouse, told theGrio, “This is a person who is very, very, very dangerous to the Black community.”
She said the Trump campaign’s selection of Vance as the vice presidential nominee shows Republicans are “going all in on the white working class and white rural voters.” She added, “They’re doing so at the absolute expense of making any kind of inroads with Black voters, with people of color [and] with women.”
Ironically, Vance argued in a leaked private text message from 2016 to a former Yale Law roommate that the Republican Party needed to “expand” its tent to Black people. He also called Trump “America’s Hitler.”
“We are, whether we like it or not, the party of lower-income, lower-education white people,” Vance wrote to now Georgia state Rep. Josh McLaurin. “I have been saying for a long time that we need to offer those people something (and hell, maybe even expand our appeal to working class black people in the process) or a demagogue would.”
Markus Batchelor, national political director at People For the American Way, said that despite his past critiques of Trump, Vance has “weaponized” the Great Replacement Theory, “championed anti-equity and inclusion legislation,” and accused Democrats of “usurping white votes with immigrant ones.”
“Those ideas are now the center of Project 2025 and the GOP platform approved this week in Milwaukee,” he added. “A Trump-Vance administration will do everything in their power — and expand their authority — to turn back the clock on race in our country.”
Batchelor continued, “The Trump-Vance agenda on immigration, abortion, public education, workers’ rights, voting rights, and many other issues will have the most negative impact on Black and brown Americans.”
As a U.S. senator, Vance introduced a bill that called for all diversity, equity and inclusion programs and funding to be eliminated from the federal government. Project 2025, a 900-page manifesto that lays out a policy agenda for a second Trump administration, proposes a similar purge of DEI.
Colbert points out that Vance is a close ally of Russell Vought, a former Trump White House official who authored part of Project 2025.
“He’s the standard bearer of the New Right. That’s what they’re calling it,” she said. “I think that J.D. Vance … is going to be very much out front, taking up the Trump mantle and actually pushing it even more to the extreme.”
Nina Turner, a former Ohio state senator, said Vance, 39, is a threat to Black and brown communities because “he’s young enough … to be dangerous for a very long time.”
She argued that if Vance’s “convictions” about Trump’s racism were real, he would have “turned down the invitation” to be his running mate.
“His ambitions are more important than an honest assessment of President Trump,” said Turner.
“He has gone and kissed the ring and bowed down to Trump to try and gain power and his position, and it’s worked for him,” said U.S. Congresswoman Stacey Plaskett, a Democrat representing the U.S. Virgin Islands.
She said the choice of Vance as Trump’s running mate presents a “stark contrast” between Republicans and Democrats.
“The Democratic Party looks like America. Trump’s party is looking like what they want it to be, a white Christian nationalist country … They’re not hiding it anymore,” Plaskett told theGrio.
“They’re saying exactly who they are, and we should believe them, whether it’s Trump’s Project 2025 or the rulings from the Supreme Court that are letting him lay the groundwork for a fascist regime.”
Colbert predicted that in the weeks and months leading up to the Nov. 5 election, Republicans will try to “sanitize” his image.
“There’s going to be a lot of talk about his age, and the fact he has an Indian wife, and he’s Yale-educated … and present him as some sort of intellectual,” she noted. “But the reality is, he is a vile, crass white nationalist.”
