Trump Proudly Endorsed J.D. Vance, Even After The ‘Hillbilly Elegy’ Author Reportedly Called Him ‘America’s Hitler’

Hillbilly whisperer J.D. Vance was endorsed by Donald Trump in the Republican Senate primary in Ohio last week, despite fears from the “haters” out there that he’s backing another loser. “After NBC dropped a story this week saying Trump was likely to endorse Vance, a ton of people bombarded Trump begging him not to — including major GOP and Trump donors backing Mandel,” Axios reports. Nevertheless, he persisted — despite Vance’s history of now-deleted anti-Trump tweets (“Like some others, J.D. Vance may have said some not so great things about me in the past, but he gets it now,” Trump said in his endorsement statement). Vance also reportedly called the former-president “America’s Hitler” in a message to his old roommate, Rep. Josh McLaurin (D-GA).

“The screenshot below is @JDVance1’s unfiltered explanation from 2016 of the breakdown in Republican politics that he now personally is trying to exploit. The ‘America’s Hitler’ bit is at the end. The public deserves to know the magnitude of this guy’s bad faith,” McLaurin tweeted about the once-“Never Trump guy.”

The screenshot shows Vance admitting that he’s “not surprised by Trump’s rise, and I think the entire party has only itself to blame. We are, whether we like it or not, the party of lower-income, lower-education white people, and 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) or a demagogue would. We are now at that point.”

Vance continued, “I go back and forth between thinking Trump is a cynical asshole like Nixon who wouldn’t be that bad (and might even prove useful) or that he’s America’s Hitler. How’s that for discouraging?” You can see McLaurin’s tweets below.