Former President Trump appeared to brush off past criticism from Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) in a new interview, stating his running mate “didn’t know” him at the time.
When asked by Fox News’s Jesse Watters why he tapped Vance for his vice president, Trump said the two “always had a good chemistry.”
“And originally JD was probably not for me, but he didn’t know me. And then when we got to know each other, he liked me maybe more than anybody liked me,” Trump said during the pretaped interview, which aired Monday night on “Jesse Watters Primetime.”
“And he would stick up for me. And he’d fight for the worker as much as I fight for the worker,” the president added. “We just had an automatic chemistry.”
The former president added how he endorsed Vance for the Senate in 2022 and pointed to the senator’s memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy,” which details Vance’s experience surrounding by poverty and addiction growing up in Ohio.
“And it was all about the working men in women and how they aren’t being treated fairly. And he was right about that,” Trump told Watters. “And I understood that maybe better than anyone else. And we just have had a great relationship. And he had serious competition.”
Shortly after Trump announced Vance as his running mate, critics were quick to point out the senator’s past attacks against the former president.
Vance previously called the former president an “idiot” and “noxious,” and in 2016, he described Trump as “cultural heroin” in a piece for The Atlantic.
“He makes some feel better for a bit. But he cannot fix what ails them, and one day they’ll realize it,” he wrote at the time.
In a social media post in 2016, Vance also weighed in on the revelations about Trump’s notorious “Access Hollywood” tape, writing, “Fellow Christians, everyone is watching us. When we apologize for this man, lord help us.”
He’s also described Trump as a “cynical a‑‑hole” and “America’s Hitler.”
Vance has since apologized for the remarks and said he was “wrong” about Trump.
“I have been very clear on this … look, I was wrong about him,” he said in an interview on CNN in May, when asked about the previous remarks. “I didn’t think he was going to be a good president … and I was very, very proud to be proven wrong. It’s one of the reasons why I’m working so hard to get him elected.”