JD Vance reportedly sought to aid Hillary Clinton's 2016 campaign to stop Donald Trump

Vice President JD Vance’s political evolution on MAGA and Donald Trump is well known, but a new report claims he went out of his way to try and stop the man who would later make him his running mate.

Several people with knowledge of the conversations described to Vanity Fair how Vance sought to get in contact with top-ranking members of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign for president to offer his aid or advice as she sought to win the general election that year.

Vance, according to someone who wound up serving as an intermediary for him to the Clinton 2016 campaign, wanted to get in touch with Jake Sullivan, who was then serving as a senior policy adviser to Clinton.

“JD called me and said, ‘Can you put me in touch with Jake Sullivan?’” said the person, according to Vanity Fair. “I was, like, ‘Jake is running Hillary’s campaign. He’s way too busy.’”

Vance did eventually get a meeting with Sullivan, according to the magazine. He and Sullivan reportedly discussed Clinton’s strategy for the states known as the Blue Wall — Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, as well as Vance’s home state of Ohio. Then a commentator largely known for his book Hillbilly Elegy, with no political experience but deep roots in the Rust Belt and Appalachia, Vance warned that Clinton needed to address the rising populist sentiment in the country.

“He listed Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and what we now call the Blue Wall states. And he’s, like, ‘She needs to come here instead of being down with Beyoncé in Miami. She needs to come here and apologize for the Iraq War. Apologize for sending so many people, my community, all the people in all these states whose sons and fathers died and everybody just forgot about them,’” said Vanity Fair’s source.

A separate person close to Sullivan confirmed the meeting, and claimed that Vance urged Sullivan to “focus” and drill down on beating Donald Trump.

She’s got to “fix this ‘deplorables’ thing,” the source close to Sullivan said he recalled Vance as saying, referring to Clinton’s infamous “basket of deplorables” comment that was seized on by conservative media and the Trump campaign as an indictment of middle America.

Clinton went on to lose all four of the states Vance reportedly warned the campaign about, dragged down by a perception of belonging to the political establishment while Trump fed the flames of furor and disgust against that same aristocracy.

Vance’s spokesperson denied that the vice president wanted Clinton to win the election in a statement to the outlet. “We 100 percent reject the characterization that he was trying to help Hillary win,” Taylor Van Kirk said. The Independent also reached out to Vance’s office for comment on the matter.

But people with knowledge of Vance’s thoughts at the time say the opposite is true.

“He called me again and he said, ‘I hate Hillary. But I hate Trump more. Trump can’t win. He can’t win. Hillary’s going to lose, but she doesn’t have to,’” said the person who served as an intermediary between Vance and Sullivan.

Vance’s former distaste for his current boss is widely reported. His former Yale Law school roommate, Josh McLaurin, wrote on X (then Twitter) that Vance had referred to Trump as having the potential to be “America’s Hitler” in a text message that same year as Trump rose to power, dominated his rivals in the Republican Party’s primary and then bulldozed his way into the White House. In the text message, which McLaurin released, Vance insinuates that he is a Republican, but views Trump as a “demagogue” playing on the GOP voter base’s fears.

“We are, whether we like it or not, the party of lower-income, lower-education white people,” Vance wrote in 2016 to his friend. “I have been saying for a long time that we need to offer these people SOMETHING (and hell, maybe even expand our appeal to working class black people in the process) or a demagogue would.”

In an interview in June, Vance addressed his past comments about Trump.

"[It was] a crazy journey, man. But, but again, I mean, it's you have to ask yourself, first of all, I thought Donald Trump would be a failed president if he got elected. He was not. I thought that America's institutions were fundamentally functioning. They were not. I thought that the military leaders who told us this about a war were the scientific experts who told us this other thing about a pandemic were fundamentally maybe not always right but fundamentally wise people who were mostly right. I was wrong,” the vice president told Newsweek.