Vice President JD Vance insisted his evolving views on President Donald Trump over the past decade were a sign of “humility” during his first interview with ABC’s The View.
Vance spoke with the show’s co-hosts on Tuesday morning to promote his newly released book Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith, but was grilled on a host of unrelated issues, including comments he made about Trump when he was first running for president in 2016.
“It’s been well covered that I was a critic of Donald Trump back in 2015 and 2016,” said Vance. “Now, obviously, I’m sitting here as the vice president of the United States in the Trump administration.”
Joy Behar, one of the hosts, interrupted Vance to ask: “So, what happened?”
“Well, Joy, a little humility, actually,” Vance answered. “I think that when you make predictions, and those predictions turn out to be false, you got to ask yourself, ‘What made me wrong about that?’”
The vice president said he was wrong to argue that Trump’s economic policies during his first administration would not lead to wage growth and that factory jobs would not return.
“So, there’s a certain point where you say, you know, I made predictions about this, I ended up being wrong,” said Vance. “And in politics, and anything, I think it’s important to say, ‘You know what, I got some things wrong,’ and I was wrong about him. He was a very successful president. It’s one of the reasons why I’ve been so supportive of him.”
Another host, Sara Haines, bluntly asked Vance, “What are you willing to excuse in the name of power?”
“I would say fundamentally that one of the things I underappreciated about Donald Trump is that so many of the things that people said about him weren’t actually true,” he responded.
Vance claimed that he had been misled to believe that Trump said that “all Mexicans were rapists.”
“He never said that,” Vance continued. “What he said, what he said is that certain South American countries, Central American countries, were releasing criminals into our country, including Mexico. By the way, that was objectively true.”
Early on, Vance is reported as having called Trump an “idiot” and, at one point, compared him to Adolf Hitler.
Elsewhere in the interview, The View hosts questioned Vance extensively about the Epstein files, which he reportedly pushed the White House to release. But Vance warned the audience not to believe certain media reports about his role in the administration as it related to the files.
“Well, I’d say, first of all, don’t believe everything that you read in any newspaper, whether it’s a right-leaning paper or a left-leaning paper,” Vance said, referring to a New York Times story in which it was reported that chief of staff Susie Wiles believed Vance was a conspiracy theorist.
“There are things that are true, things that are false, and things that are totally missing context,” he continued. “No. 1, I am frankly kind of a conspiracy theorist on the Epstein stuff. So that’s one of the things that’s true, is that some people called me a conspiracy theorist on the Epstein stuff.”
“I think that it’s crazy that you had this guy who was clearly a sex predator who was hanging out with a lot of very wealthy and powerful people, like that really bothered me.”
Vance also insisted he was for full transparency on the issue as Trump discouraged lawmakers from voting for the release of the Epstein files earlier this year. The president eventually changed his view and supported the legislation.
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“What I disagree with is the idea that the White House wasn’t committed to full transparency,” said Vance, before ribbing the hosts about his defense of Trump.
“Sorry, Joy, I do have to defend my boss,” he said. “I know you guys don’t always appreciate this, but you know one of the things you see in the Epstein emails is that Jeffrey Epstein hated Donald Trump, and that Donald Trump literally reported Jeffrey Epstein to the police.”