Old interviews of U.S. Vice President JD Vance slamming Trump resurface
The content of the video is genuine and dates back to 2016 when Vance was promoting his book and was a vocal opponent of Trump.
CLAIM
Interviews with U.S. Vice President JD Vance harshly criticising President Donald Trump, including calling him “noxious” and agreeing with an interviewer that he is “a fraud” have resurfaced.
BACKGROUND
The X account @resist_vanessa shared a video montage of Vance’s many harsh criticisms of Trump several times in February and once more at the start of March, each time racking up tens of thousands of shares.
All of the interview clips in the montage date back to 2016, when Vance was public about his opposition to Trump.
Media coverage of previous remarks
Vance’s public opposition to Trump was widely covered by U.S. media in summer 2024, when Trump selected him as running mate in the run-up to the election. However, Vance’s stance on Trump had already notably turned around three years earlier, when he deleted tweets slamming Trump.
CNN reporter Andrew Kaczynski in 2021 unearthed a number of deleted tweets posted by Vance in 2016, including one calling Trump “reprehensible”. The tweets were posted on the verified but now deleted account @JDVance1.
Vance entered politics in 2021 and was elected to the Senate the following year after he received Trump’s endorsement in the Ohio Republican Senate primary. The boost came after Vance made a concerted yearlong effort adopt a new image as a leading supporter of Trump.
In 2016, Vance had descibed himself as a “Never Trump guy” — a reference to the Never Trump campaign — in an interview with talk show host Charlie Rose which was also featured in this clip.
The clip also includes audio from an interview on the Matt Jones Podcast in August 2016 promoting his book The Hillbilly Elegy, where Vance agreed with Jones that Trump was “a fraud”. CNN reporter Kaczynski also shared the audio again in July 2024.
It also shows a clip from a September 2016 interview on PBS Newshour, which can be found on PBS’ YouTube channel. In it he said that there was “an element of Donald Trump’s support that has its basis in racism or xenophobia”. It can be accessed here.
Vance has publicly acknowledged his previous opposition to Trump.
In 2021, he told Fox News: “Like a lot of people, I criticised Trump back in 2016,” He went on saying: “And I ask folks not to judge me based on what I said in 2016, because I’ve been very open that I did say those critical things and I regret them, and I regret being wrong about the guy. I think he was a good president, I think he made a lot of good decisions for people, and I think he took a lot of flak.”
Trump called out Vance’s harsh criticism during a rally in Delaware for the Ohio senate primary in April 2022. When Vance took the stage, he reportedly said: “The president is right. I wasn’t always nice, but the simple fact is, he’s the best president of my lifetime, and he revealed the corruption in this country like nobody else.”
Dating the montage
The clip that was being shared by @resist_vanessa has the logo for MSNBC Morning Joe — a current affairs morning show on the American network — on it in the bottom right corner. It does not give any indication when it might have been produced. We found the first examples of the clip being circulated on X in mid-July 2024 around the time that Trump announced Vance as running mate.
A search of the MSNBC Morning Joe YouTube channel for videos published around that time, however, did not come up with the clip. This may have been because it was not uploaded or is older.
MSNBC did, however, publish a video from their TV host Rachel Maddow’s show listing the many critical comments made by Vance about Trump, including some of those in this footage.
Analysis of X account @resist_vanessa
While the content of the video is genuine, there are questions around the account @resist_vannessa that shared it. The account claimed the video had been deleted from X, and its account with 200,000 followers suspended. While the account showed only around 44,300 followers at time of writing, it is not possible to verify if the video was deleted or whether and for what reason the account was suspended.
@resist_vanessa has an earliest post from February 11 simply saying: “I’m back.” It then went on to publish several videos all claiming, just like this one, that it had been suspended and footage was deleted “by Elon Musk.” Under its posts it frequently shares links to websites selling anti-Trump t-shirts.
The nature of the posts, that all have similar wording, suggests this is not a genuine account but a spam account. In unrated Community Notes on X the following comment is left on the account: “Account @resist_vanessa was previously (Twitter ID 1821701440261197824) active as: @MA_Joyful_Again, @should_love_cat, @trump_lies47.”
Page source code for archived versions of the X accounts bearing those names confirms that the unique X account identifier is indeed the same for each of those and for the @resist_vanessa account.
RATING
The content of the video is genuine and dates back to 2016 when Vance was promoting his book and was a vocal opponent of Trump. This has been publicly acknowledged, both by Vance and Trump and covered repeatedly by the media in the U.S. but also abroad.
The clip was newly shared by an X account that has been earmarked as spam by Community Notes and has been promoting t-shirts with political messages under its popular posts.
SOURCES
PBS News. (2024). Fact-checking JD Vance’s past statements and relationship with Trump. [online] [Accessed 4 Mar. 2025].
PBS NewsHour (2016). The struggling, rural, white communities that feel like nobody cares. YouTube. [Accessed 4 Mar. 2025].
Greve, J.E. (2022). JD Vance Senate run is test of Trump influence on Republican party. [online] the Guardian. [Accessed 4 Mar. 2025].
McCarthy, M. (2024). ‘I’m a Never Trump guy’: All of J.D. Vance’s Trump quotes that could come back to bite him. [online] POLITICO. [Accessed 4 Mar. 2025].
MSNBC (2024). ‘Noxious’: See Maddow expose JD Vance’s past statements about Trump, Jan. 6 and more. [online] YouTube. [Accessed 4 Mar. 2025].
Charlie Rose. (2016). J. D. Vance – Charlie Rose. [online][Accessed 4 Mar. 2025].
X (formerly Twitter). (2025). This JD Vance’ video was deleted from Twitter by Elon Musk and my account (220k followers) was suspended. [Accessed 4 Mar. 2025].
X (formerly Twitter). (2025). Audio we uncovered in 2021 of Vance promoting his book in 2016 saying he agreed Trump was… [Accessed 4 Mar. 2025].
X (formerly Twitter). (2025). Vance also deleted a tweet saying he found Trump reprehensible from October 2016. [Accessed 4 Mar. 2025].
X (formerly Twitter). (2025). BOOM: Recently resurfaced video of JD Vance calling trump a noxious fraud who doesn't care about folks. [Accessed 4 Mar. 2025].