HOW MITT ROMNEY SOLD ME ON J.D. VANCE:
If you need any more convincing about J.D. Vance, I point you to a September 2023 article from The Atlantic written by Mitt Romney’s biographer, McKay Coppins.
But as Romney surveyed the crop of Republicans running for Senate in 2022, it was clear that more Hawleys were on their way. Perhaps most disconcerting was J. D. Vance, the Republican candidate in Ohio. “I don’t know that I can disrespect someone more than J. D. Vance,” Romney told me. They’d first met years earlier, after he read Vance’s best-selling memoir, Hillbilly Elegy. Romney was so impressed with the book that he hosted the author at his annual Park City summit in 2018. Vance, who grew up in a poor, dysfunctional family in Appalachia and went on to graduate from Yale Law School, had seemed bright and thoughtful, with interesting ideas about how Republicans could court the white working class without indulging in toxic Trumpism. Then, in 2021, Vance decided he wanted to run for Senate, and reinvented his entire persona overnight. Suddenly, he was railing against the “childless left” and denouncing Indigenous Peoples’ Day as a “fake holiday” and accusing Joe Biden of manufacturing the opioid crisis “to punish people who didn’t vote for him.” The speed of the MAGA makeover was jarring.
“I don’t know that I can disrespect someone more than J. D. Vance,” said Mitt Romney.
Is there any better endorsement than that?
I don’t think Romney realizes how his genteel response to the endless pummeling he received courtesy of Obama, his vice president, and his operatives with bylines led directly to the Trump era. As did his continuing Stockholm Syndrome after the ordeal. In December Romney was quoted by NBC as saying he doesn’t rule out voting for Biden, and that Trump has ‘authoritarian’ interests.
Flashback to 2012: Biden: Romney’s approach to financial regulation will ‘put y’all back in chains.’