Former presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg has questioned JD Vance’s drastic gear switch from calling Donald Trump “America’s Hitler” to becoming his vice president.
Talking to Pod Save America on Sunday, Buttigieg called Vance “a very smart person,” but added the 41-year-old is “not a very principled person.”
Buttigieg discussed the VP’s position as a successor to Trump after he was quizzed by host Jon Favreau about Vance’s “seeming inevitable candidacy in 2028.”
“I think he’s very intelligent. I think he’s very smooth. I think he’s very capable,” Buttigieg said, before weighing into recent parodies of Vance, including on last week’s South Park episode.
“Let’s be clear, we’re talking about a very smart person, not a very principled person. It didn’t take him many years to go from comparing Trump to Hitler-which he did-to saying that he ought to be the leader of the free world.”
In messages sent to a law school roommate in 2016, Vance was a proud never Trumper, calling the now-president “an idiot”, “reprehensible” and “America’s Hitler.” “I’m not surprised by Trump’s rise, and I think the entire party has only itself to blame,” Vance said, according to Vice.
“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?”
Vance has not shied away from his radical former claims. Last year, he said he did not “hide” from his comments, but no longer believed them.
“I was certainly skeptical of Donald Trump in 2016,” Vance told Fox News last year. “But President Trump was a great president and he changed my mind.”
Born in Ohio, Vance released his memoir Hillbilly Elegy in 2016, describing his life growing up in the mid-West working class with a drug-addicted mother. He was raised by his grandparents.
Buttigieg talked about Vance’s rise from lawyer and venture capitalist “explaining the industrial Midwest to coastal elites,” before he “became wealthy” and moved to Silicon Valley.
Buttigieg said Vance then “ran with a lot of people we would consider to have centrist or even centre-left values and saw the writing on the wall and found this path to power.”
The interview came on the same day of Vance’s interview with Fox News, though the interview on Fox News’ Sunday Morning Futures was taped on Friday, according to Reuters. In his talk with host Maria Bartiromo, the vice president said indictments were on their way in the Trump administration’s quest to blame Obama intelligence officials for interfering in the 2016 election. He also weighed in on the Epstein files saga, sparking furore on both sides of the aisle over his comments.
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