'Hillbilly Elegy' author and potential Senate candidate JD Vance deleted his old anti-Trump tweets

• Ahead of a possible Senate run in Ohio, JD Vance deleted several tweets critical of Donald Trump.
• The "Hillbilly Elegy" author's deleted tweets were found by CNN's KFile.
• Vance tweeted his plans to vote for independent presidential candidate Evan McMullin in 2016.

Ohio's 2022 Senate campaign may already have a lightning rod issue in its GOP primary with the discovery of potential candidate JD Vance deleting several anti-Trump tweets.

Andrew Kaczynski, the head of CNN's KFile unit retrieved the deleted Vance tweets from an internet archive, and posted their screenshots on Thursday.

Vance, the author of the best-selling "Hillbilly Elegy" memoir, has the support of conservative billionaire Peter Thiel and recently visited Mar-a-Lago in Florida to court former President Donald Trump for his highly coveted endorsement in the primary.

But, on October 9, 2016, Vance tweeted that he found Trump "reprehensible" and that "God wants better of us."

One of Vance's deleted tweets reads "Lord help us" on the day the "Access Hollywood" tape was released in 2016, which showed Trump on a hot mic bragging about sexually assaulting women.

Since he began flirting with a Senate run, Vance's Twitter persona has increasingly leaned into pro-Trump material as well as the GOP messaging focus on critical race theory.

"Hillbilly Elegy" is a memoir examining Vance's upbringing in Middletown, Ohio, and how white people in rural areas of the US are suffering through economic hardship and increasing rates of drug addiction. It was turned into a 2020 movie starring Amy Adams and Glenn Close.

Vance received criticism over for making overly general claims about poverty and overplaying his Appalachian identity as an Ohioan with his grandparents living in Kentucky.

If he officially enters the Ohio Senate race, Vance will be up against the early frontrunner, former Ohio Treasurer Josh Mandel, who recently saw campaign staffers depart over an allegedly toxic work environment.