The New York Times published emails on Saturday in which former President Donald Trump's chosen running mate J.D. Vance called Trump "morally reprehensible."
Vance was emailing Sophia Nelson, a former Yale Law School classmate, who is transgender, between 2014 and 2017.
Nelson apparently saved the emails and decided to leak them to the Times, which eagerly make some of them public.
Emails and text messages shared by JD Vance's former Yale Law School classmate show how the Ohio senator pivoted from being a strong opponent of Donald Trump to his running mate. Here are five of the most revealing moments in their correspondence. https://t.co/6lGMsjRULj
— The New York Times (@nytimes) July 27, 2024
The emails reveal where Vance stood at the time. Anyone who has been paying attention to Vance since that time knows he didn't start out as a Trump supporter.
Vance said that Trump was "morally reprehensible" and expressed animosity toward police and their treatment of Black people.
Nelson said that the frequent emails and texts stopped when the two had a falling out over Vance's support for a ban on transgender medical procedures for minors.
“I’m obviously outraged at Trump’s rhetoric, and I worry most of all about how welcome Muslim citizens feel in their own country," Vance wrote in 2015. "But I also think that people have always believed crazy s—… And there have always been demagogues willing to exploit the people who believe crazy s—.”
“The more white people feel like voting for trump, the more black people will suffer. I really believe that,” Vance wrote to Nelson in 2016. Another email later that year said, “He is just a bad man. A morally reprehensible human being.”
While Trump obviously had enough support to get elected in 2016, he also had many detractors who now support him, including radio host Glenn Beck and Sens. Jeb Bush (R-FL) and Lindsey Graham (R-SC).
Before Trump was elected in 2016, no one knew what he would do and whether his policies would actually be conservative.
It is not difficult to imagine that Vance came around after seeing Trump's performance in his first term.
In addition, comparing Trump's tenure to Biden's has led many voters who originally felt Trump wasn't a great candidate to change their minds. Vance must be one of them.
Of course, the Times wants voters to see Vance as a politically expedient hypocrite who is willing to throw his convictions out the window for power, while at the same time ignoring the many conflicting statements of newly coronated presumptive Democrat nominee Kamala Harris regarding her running mate, both before and after she was chosen to be so.
