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People are making hay of this old tweet from Vance.
Of course, the usual suspects in the MSM are not quoting the whole tweet, just the Hitler part. I think the whole quote is a lot more interesting, and makes a lot of sense.
A lot of never Trumpers (like Vance) are coming to the conclusion that Trump is actually not all that bad. We saw what a first term looked like. It was pretty middle of the road, with some modest successes in foreign policy and taxation.
Now we see Trump on the campaign trail on his best behavior. 2016 Trump might have mocked Biden during the debate. 2024 Trump did not. As President, will he put aside his ego and listen to the smart people in the room like Vance, Thiel, Vivek, Ackman, or Musk? Being entirely unbeholden to the powers that be, there's a sense that a Trump administration can effect real and lasting change. And the assassination attempt has given Trump much needed gravitas which might carry over into a popular mandate.
I guess he landed on option 1.
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This is exactly why I have zero trouble believing that Vance is a genuine convert. I share quite a few demographic attributes with Vance. In 2016, I did not vote for Trump, I condemned him as a personally immoral man and worried in text messages about his potentially destabilizing impact on the country. By early 2020, I still thought he was a personally immoral man, but a decent enough President. After Kavanaugh, Covid lockdowns, Floyd riots, and so many more things big and small, I was dead-set against the Democrat Party and voted for Trump, the first time I had ever voted Republican. After what I consider four years of awful governance and an attempted assassination, I'm ready to don a red hat. Maybe Vance is just seeing where the wind blows, but it's not hard at all for me to think that a white guy in his late 30s from the Midwest thinks the things Vance articulates.
There's some joke here about Vance converting to Catholicism and Trumpism recently.
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Get it?
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My dad’s side of the family are West Virginia hill folk that moved to southwestern Ohio for factory work, and I spent the first half of my childhood in Ohio.
Hillbilly Elegy was the first book I read that sounded like stories I used to hear. There was the time the town got a cop car which was burned shortly after. There was the child molester that disappeared and for which it was strongly implied that an uncle had taken care of him. And then the relatives that had chaotic lives of drinking and drugs.
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