Author and Senate candidate J.D. Vance says he needs to 'suck it up and support' Trump to win votes
- The author and Senate candidate deleted an old tweet that called Trump "reprehensible."
- He has since said he was wrong about Trump, and apologized.
- "If I actually care about these people ... I need to just suck it up and support him," Vance said.
J.D. Vance has said he needed to "suck it up and support" Donald Trump after deleting tweets critical of the former president.
Vance, a Republican running for Ohio's Senate seat in 2022, told Time in an interview published Wednesday: "I'm not just a flip-flopper, I'm a flip-flop-flipper on Trump."
Vance went on to call Trump "the leader of this movement" and said: "If I actually care about these people and the things I say I care about, I need to just suck it up and support him."
The interview came after CNN's Andrew Kaczynski reported earlier this month that Vance had deleted his old anti-Trump tweets, including one in 2016 that called Trump's treatment of Muslims and immigrants "reprehensible," and said he would not vote for him.
When pressed on the issue in a Tuesday Fox News interview, Vance said: "I regret being wrong about the guy."
"I think he was a good president," Vance said. "I think he made a lot of good decisions for people, and I think he took a lot of flak."
Vance reportedly visited Trump at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida shortly before announcing that he would be running for Ohio's senate seat - soon to be vacated by GOP Sen. Rob Portman, who is retiring.
Trump has yet to endorse a candidate in the Ohio senate race. Democratic Rep. Tim Ryan is also running for the seat.
Speaking to Time about his past criticism, Vance said he understood Trump's ticket back in 2016, but thought he wasn't serious.
"I sort of got Trump's issues from the beginning," Vance said. "I just thought that this guy was not serious and was not going to be able to really make progress on the issues I cared about."
Vance, who currently works as a venture capitalist, shot to fame in 2016 with his best-selling book "Hillbilly Elegy," a memoir about growing up with a drug-addicted mother in Kentucky.