Vice President JD Vance had to wriggle out of a tough question about his criticism of President Donald Trump.
The 41-year-old appeared on Diary of a CEO with podcaster Stephen Bartlett in an episode released Thursday, in which the Brit challenged him over comments he wrote for The Atlantic during the 2016 election cycle.
Bartlett read an excerpt from the article, where Vance argued that Trump offered simple solutions to complex problems, from building a wall to end the drug epidemic to using carpet bombing to avoid military humiliation.
Vance also claimed that no “credible military leaders” supported his plans and that the reason Trump didn’t offer details is that he “can’t”
“Long time ago,” Vance began his rebuttal. “I think you always have to be able to acknowledge when you’re right and when you’re wrong. And, you know, there was a lot I was right about in 2016.”
“I believed it when I wrote it, and reading it now, I’m almost embarrassed that I wrote it because it was so obviously absurd,” Vance said. “The fact that Donald Trump was misaligned with the military experts and the military leadership of 2016 was a good thing, not a bad thing.
“Think about those military leaders. I mean, I have a lot of respect for the troops, the people who serve, the people who put on a uniform, but you can make a very credible argument that from the early ’90s until, you know, at least 2016, America hadn’t won a war in 30 years.
“Like there’s a reason why Donald Trump mistrusted the military leadership, and he was right. And so much of what I think the president represented at the time was a recognition that American institutions had become sclerotic and broken, and he was a weapon to break down those institutions.”
In 2016, Trump was strongly in favor of more bombing. The month before Vance’s July article, Trump clashed with Pentagon bosses over his demands for more airstrikes on countries such as Syria and Iraq as a means to tackle terror plots on U.S. soil.
“We have to really increase the bombings,” he told Fox & Friends at the time.
Vance then told Bartlett that he had truly believed at the time he wrote the piece that Trump would not be a good leader for the U.S.
“I thought Donald Trump would be a failed president if he got elected. He was not,” he said. “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 are mostly right. I was wrong.”
Since the Trump-Vance ticket’s election, the White House has systemically attacked government institutions, from the early days of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s mass firing of generals to Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s controversial alterations to the healthcare system.
Later in the interview, Vance took it upon himself to do some sucking up to Trump, saying that the man he had gotten to know was very different from the person he thought he was writing the article about.
“Donald Trump is much different as a human being than the media makes him out to be,” he said. “He’s very warm. He’s a very, like, loving person to his kids, to his grandkids. He’s incredibly generous. Like, if you see Donald Trump, you know, in the Oval Office, it’s like he has to give you a gift, whether it’s a water bottle or a MAGA hat or a coin or a pin. He’s one of those people who really likes hospitality.”
