According to Twitter direct messages from 2017 obtained by CNN, Ohio Republican Senate candidate and "Hillbilly Elegy" author J.D. Vance called then-President Donald Trump as a "moral disaster" whose administration had "no domestic policy agenda besides tax cuts."
"Can you imagine running as an anti-AHCA populist who thinks Trump is a moral disaster," Vance wrote. "Where's my constituency?"
CNN found other anti-Trump comments from Vance from 2016, 2017 and 2018, where he said Trump was a "fraud" and that he'd possibly vote for Hillary Clinton if he thought Trump had a chance of winning.
"I cannot stand Trump because I think he's a fraud. Well, I think he's a total fraud that is exploiting these people," Kentucky radio host Matt Jones said to Vance in August 2016.
"I do too," Vance replied. "I agree with you on Trump, because I don't think that he's the person. I don't think he actually cares about folks. I think he just recognizes that there was a hole in the conversation and that hole is that people from these regions of the country, they feel ignored. They feel left out and they feel very frustrated. And I think of course in a lot of ways they feel that way for totally justifiable reasons. So it's a problem that Trump has been the vessel of a lot of that frustration."
Vance came under fire after he entered the primary to fill the seat of retiring Republican Sen. Rob Portman over now-deleted tweets from 2016 where he called Trump "reprehensible" and said he would be voting for third-party candidate Evan McMullin.
Read the full report over at CNN.
