Tuesday morning on Always Right with Bob Frantz, weekday mornings on AM 1420 The Answer, host Frantz welcomed JD Vance to address tough questions about why he changed his mind about Trump and accepted his endorsement.
Frantz: Ever since I heard the announcement late last week that President Trump was going to make an endorsement in the Ohio GOP primary race for the Senate seat currently held by Rob Portman, indeed he did.
He chose JD Vance as his guy to try to pick up, or actually retain this red seat in the United States Senate coming up in November.
And JD Vance joins us now for an exclusive conversation as to how and why and what this means going forward. JD, thank you for coming on. Good morning.
Vance: Thanks, Bob. Good morning to you.
Frantz: Congratulations on the endorsement. First and foremost, how does it feel to have the support of the former president?
Vance: That’s great. Obviously, a huge boost to us in this race. Down the final stretch, the president called me. I was actually having a milkshake with my kid on Friday evening when he called me and told me he was going to endorse me.
So, very exciting. I think, as you know, Bob, given the attacks that have been against me for things I criticized the president over six years ago, it’s good to have the president coming in and saying, look, I trust this guy.
I support this guy, and he’s the guy for my agenda. So it’s very helpful. But we’re still going to have to work as hard as we can over the next two weeks to actually earn the support of voters all across the state.
Frantz: No question about that. And obviously, we’re going to start there because we have to. I mean, I don’t think anybody who has heard this endorsement is thinking, does the president trust JD Vance most on immigration?
Does he trust him the most on China? People are saying, wait a minute, President Trump forgave JD Vance for all of those things? So we have to hit this and then we’ll talk about policy. Far away, the biggest talking point here is your past comments about him.
So you said you got a phone call where you’re having a milkshake with your kid, which is a great story, by the way. But tell me first, when did you meet with President Trump to discuss his endorsement?
And secondly, JD, did he ever ask you directly, man to man and face to face, why you said the things about him you did and about his supporters? And what did you say in return to that?
Vance: Well, 100 percent he did the first time. And really the only time I actually ever asked for the president’s support was probably a year or so, maybe a year and a half or so ago, when I first met with him talking about the race.
I hadn’t yet declared my candidacy. I think it was right after Portman retired. And I said, sir, I want your support in this race, but most importantly, I want to earn it. I want you to see how I perform, the things that I do, and how I conduct myself on the campaign trail.
I’m not going to beg for it, but I really want it. And I think that once you see me out there, you’re going to think I’m the best guy. And of course he asked me.
I’ve had a number of conversations with the president over the past several years. He knows that I was a critic of his in 2016. It comes up usually as kind of a gentle … ribbing, “JD, you’re good, but you weren’t always with me.”
And I think that the president knows a lot of people, I think, who weren’t with him, who became converts to the calls for various reasons. And of course, we can talk about that. But yeah, he absolutely asked me about it.
And I said, look, sir, I was wrong. I’m man enough to admit that I was wrong. I think everybody should be willing to change their mind when the facts change.
And for me, Bob, what’s always been most important, is the policy matters. I think he was a great president on policy. We can talk about that stuff. But to me, really, the corruption the Trump revealed in our country is something I was blind to five or six years ago.
I’m not blind to it anymore, because he was president. I’ve never seen somebody who the powerful institutions in our country from the media, the Big Tech companies, our bureaucracy, the FBI, I’ve never seen someone who tried to destroy more.
And I started to think to myself, look, if they’re going after this guy so hard, it suggests, one, there’s profound brokenness in the powerful people in our country.
But two, it suggests that there’s something real about this, there’s something real about this movement because if there wasn’t, they wouldn’t waste time trying to destroy them. So I think I’ve had that conversation with the president, obviously with a lot of voters.
And I’m sure I’ll continue to have that conversation because it’s something they hit me with all the time. But look, that’s politics. And part of politics is actually explaining who you are, what you think, and what you believe about issues, so I don’t complain about it.
Frantz: I’m glad to hear you say that, because I’ve got a few more tough questions for you on it that just have to be honest. I’ve read on the air, either with you or not, in both cases, some of your past comments, and you’ve addressed them specifically.
And JD, this is one that the internet is just always turning up new stuff. And this one is, the first time I’ve seen this was yesterday. This was from a 2016 tweet. And I want to read just the last half of it where you wrote: “Trump is the fruit of the party’s collective neglect.
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.”
How’s that for discouraging? JD, it’s one thing to say I disagreed with him on his policy. I disagreed with him on this, that or the other thing then and I have since evolved my thinking and I have repented for those things and I didn’t mean those things.
But the Hitler narrative is a little tougher to walk back, in my opinion. That’s a hard thing to say about somebody. Can you give me anything on that?
Vance: I think repentance is the wrong way to think about it, Bob. I think, look, you can admit that you’re wrong about something and just admit that, right? Admit that you changed your mind. I think people are going to change their minds from time to time.
But I think what’s so interesting about this is the Left constantly drags up stuff that I said about Trump seven years ago, six years ago, five years ago, and tries to beat me over the head with it. I’ve got the president’s endorsement.
I’ve talked with the president about a lot of this stuff. Frankly, things that I said publicly are out there and are worse than some of the things that I said privately.
So I’ve had plenty of conversations with the president about this and I think if he trusts me to put forward his agenda, and he thinks I’m the guy who actually believes this stuff and can deliver on this stuff, I think ultimately that is what is most important. And the Left, look, they’re going to bring this stuff up, Bob, for the rest of my life.
They’re always going to bring up the fact that I had a very public conversion on probably the most important political figure in my lifetime.
That is part of the game in politics these days. But I’m not going to hide from the fact that I changed my mind and I’m not going to apologize for it. At the end of the day, I was wrong. The president accepts it. I think a lot of voters accepted it. And that’s that.
Listen to the interview:
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