JD Vance secretly funneled advice to Hillary Clinton on how to beat Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential race, according to an insider.
Before Vance, 42, completed his MAGA makeover, he was appalled by the thought of Trump in the White House. Before that scenario became a reality, Vance wrote to a friend on Facebook, mulling over the possibility that Trump might become “America’s Hitler.”
Trump eventually saw off his opponent, Democrat Hillary Clinton. But that wasn’t through a lack of effort from Vance, according to campaign insiders.
An intermediary to Clinton’s campaign told Vanity Fair that he demanded the attention of Jake Sullivan, the former first lady and Secretary of State’s senior policy adviser, who later served as national security adviser under President Joe Biden.
In fact, after he was initially rebuffed, Vance, fresh off the release of his memoir Hillbilly Elegy, would not give up on his quest to stop Trump.
“JD called me and said, ‘Can you put me in touch with Jake Sullivan?’” the insider said. “I was, like, ‘Jake is running Hillary’s campaign. He’s way too busy.’ He called me again, and he said, ‘I hate Hillary. But I hate Trump more. Trump can’t win. He can’t win. Hillary’s going to lose, but she doesn’t have to.’”
His idea to defeat the New York businessman was for Clinton, who had, in 2002, voted for a resolution authorizing George W. Bush’s Iraq invasion, to go to Midwestern swing states and apologize.
The insider explained: “He listed Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and what we now call the Blue Wall states. And he’s like, ‘She needs to come here instead of being down with Beyoncé in Miami. She needs to come here and apologize for the Iraq War. Apologize for sending so many people, my community, all the people in all these states whose sons and fathers died and everybody just forgot about them.’”
Clinton had already expressed regret for her Iraq War vote years before the 2016 election, including in her 2014 memoir. However, she did not take up Vance’s strategy to tour the Rust Belt and grovel.
Vanity Fair reported that Vance and Sullivan spoke six weeks before the election, weeks after Clinton caused controversy when, speaking at a fundraiser in New York City, she said half of Donald Trump’s supporters belong in a “basket of deplorables” characterized by “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic” views.
Vance eventually voted for independent candidate Evan McMullin.
A source close to Sullivan, who now teaches at Harvard, said he had no recollection of Vance’s apology tour idea, but said they did discuss Clinton’s “deplorables” mess.
“She’s got to focus,” the seemingly concerned eventual MAGA VP said, according to the source.
Taylor Van Kirk, Vance’s spokesperson, didn’t deny the account, but took issue with the perception that it was an attempt to help Trump’s nemesis win. “A lot of people asked the Vice President for advice in 2016. He never worked for a campaign, but he urged both Republicans and Democrats to care about working class towns like Middletown, Ohio. We 100 percent reject the characterization that he was trying to help Hillary win,” she said.
Trump, meanwhile, despises Clinton. He recalled the “deplorables” comment as recently as August this year. “Remember Crooked Hillary? Do you remember what she said? They’re deplorable and irredeemable. That was the end of her election…she was deplorable.”
The backchannel help claims come from a Vanity Fair profile on Vance at Yale, where he earned a reputation as a “drama queen,” according to a friend.
The younger Vance, who certainly didn’t dispel this reputation with an Oval Office meltdown at Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky years later, would get riled up if his classmate and eventual wife, Usha Chilukuri, got bad grades, or if someone spoke down to him.
“He had a really big anger, a strong conviction, which I now see as part of what he is—you know, not trusting these arrogant coastal elites that don’t care,” the friend said.
They said he once got upset when a professor made disparaging remarks about students from state schools. “He said, ‘I’m transferring, I’m dropping out.’ He was very drama queen,” they explained.
Of the Feb. 2025 blowup at Zelensky, the friend added, “He’s not very good at BS, and you can tell he just didn’t like Zelensky. There are people he doesn’t like. He gets his back up.”
By this point, Vance had fully ingratiated himself with Trump. In 2022, when his 2016 comparison between Trump and Hitler made headlines, a spokesperson said it no longer represented Vance’s views.
Indeed, he is now the favorite to succeed Trump at the party’s zenith and lead the GOP ticket in 2028.
