Donald Trump announced that he tapped Ohio Senator J.D. Vance as his Vice President for his 2024 presidential bid on Monday ahead of the Republican National Convention. However, Vance, in his own words, wasn’t always a “Trump guy.”

While the Senator embraced Trump and his populist MAGA agenda back in 2022 during his Senate campaign, he has previously shared some harsh words about the ex-president.

Vance, author of best-selling memoir-turned-movie “Hillbilly Elegy,” said that Trump is a “cynical a**hole” who is “America’s Hitler” that only an “idiot” would vote to the highest office in the country.

Vance wrote in a 2016 article for The Atlantic titled “Opioid of the Masses,” that Trump was not the solution to America’s problems.

“During this election season, it appears that many Americans have reached for a new pain reliever,” he wrote. “It enters minds, not through lungs or veins, but through eyes and ears, and its name is Donald Trump.”

He repeated an epithet used in the article during an appearance on Charlie Rose on PBS, where he described Trump as a “cultural heroin.”

He described Trump’s “actual policy proposals,” as ranging “from immoral to absurd” in a 2016 opinion column for USA Today.

That same year, he told NPR that Trump was the only candidate tapping into rural frustrations, however, warned that he was “leading the white working class to a very dark place.”

A 2022 report found that he wrote in private Facebook message during his Never-Trump years that he thought Trump was a “cynical a**hole” who was “America’s Hitler” to a classmate at Yale Law School.

“I find him reprehensible,” Mr. Vance wrote in 2016 on Twitter, slamming Trump for making immigrants and Musllims feel unwelcome.

“In 4 years, I hope people remember that it was those of us who empathized with Trump’s voters who fought him most aggressively,” he wrote in another Twitter post from 2017 after Trump won.

However, since changing his tune, Vance has said that he was “incredibly honored” to get an endorsement from Trump, writing that “[Trump] was an incredible fighter for hard working Americans in the White House,” adding that he “he will be again.”

He went on to embrace Trump’s populist right-wing policies, from supporting a national abortion ban with no exception for rape and invest to supporting the white supremacist Great Replacement Theory and Russia‘s war on Ukraine. He also does not believe in gay marriage among other things.

“I like him,” Vance said about Trump in an interview with The New York Times this month. “When they say, ‘He’s threatening the foundation of American society,’ I can’t help but roll my eyes.”