Since the Trump administration rolled out sweeping worldwide tariffs, unsettling global financial markets, Vice President JD Vance has been one of the White House’s key messengers, taking to the airwaves to tout his “enthusiasm” for the unprecedented shift.
However, before he was a spokesman for the Trump Liberation Day tariffs, Vance was critical of the very same policies, including directly rebuking Trump when he talked about similar measures during his first term, according to an analysis from CNN’s KFILE.
The Trump administration’s major argument for the tariffs has been that they will encourage firms to bring manufacturing jobs back to the U.S., claims Vance once dismissed out of hand.
The former senator for Ohio once called fighting for such jobs “yesterday’s war,” and used other comments to advocate for education and retraining as ways to lift American workers instead.
“So many of these jobs that have disappeared from these areas just aren’t coming back. They haven’t disappeared so much from globalization or from shipping them overseas,” he said in 2017. “They’ve largely disappeared because of automation and because of new technological change.”
Elsewhere, Vance responded directly to Trump’s long-running calls for tariffs.
“Can’t be repeated enough: if you’re worried about America’s economic interest, focus more on automation/education than trade protectionism,” Vance wrote on what was then Twitter in 2017, after Trump met with manufacturing CEOs that year.
“Vice President Vance has been crystal clear in his unwavering support for revitalizing the American economy by bringing back manufacturing jobs and sticking up for middle class workers and families since before he launched his U.S. Senate race, and that is a large part of why he was elected to public office in the first place,” a spokesperson for Vance told the KFILE.
The resurfaced trade comments are the latest example of Vance having to justify his past, often strident, criticisms of Trump and his ideas.
Vance, who once flatly declared himself a “Never Trump guy” who “never liked” the New York Republican, has reportedly previously called Trump a “fraud,” a “moral disaster,” a “cynical a**hole,” a “bad man,” and suggested he could be “America’s Hitler.” He also once reportedly said Trump had “thoroughly failed to deliver his economic populism.”
Vance began to change his tone towards Trump after his best-selling memoir Hillbilly Elegy and association with investor Peter Thiel helped him become a rising star in Republican politics.
“I did say those critical things and I regret them, and I regret being wrong about the guy,” Vance said during his 2021 campaign for Senate. “I think he was a good president, I think he made a lot of good decisions for people, and I think he took a lot of flak.”
During the 2024 campaign, Vance said “dishonest fabrications” in the media previously misled him about Trump.
“I’ve always been extremely open about the fact that I was wrong about Donald Trump,” Vance said during a vice-presidential debate. “I was wrong first of all because I believed some of the media stories that turned out to be dishonest fabrications of his record.
