Hillbilly Elegy author JD Vance sorry for since-deleted anti-Trump tweets

The Hillbilly Elegy author turned Republican Senate candidate JD Vance has apologised for a former political position: critic of Donald Trump.

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“Like a lot of people, I criticised Trump back in 2016,” Vance told Fox News on Monday. “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.”

Vance is a former US Marine and venture capitalist who has attracted strong backing from the rightwing tech billionaire Peter Thiel. He announced his run for Senate in Ohio last week.

Hillbilly Elegy was a bestseller in 2016. Writing for the Guardian, Sarah Smarsh said: “A successful attorney who had a precariously middle-class upbringing in an Ohio steel town, Vance wrote of the chaos that can haunt a family with generational memory of deep poverty.

“A conservative who says he won’t vote for Trump, Vance speculates about why working-class whites will: cultural anxiety that arises when opioid overdose kills your friends and the political establishment has proven it will throw you under the bus.”

Last week, deleted tweets from 2016 unearthed by CNN showed Vance calling Trump’s views on immigrants and Muslims “reprehensible” and saying he would vote for Evan McMullin, an independent conservative.

A possible opponent in the 2022 Ohio Senate race, the Democratic congressman Tim Ryan, tweeted that he and Vance “have exactly one thing in common – neither of us voted for Donald Trump”.

Vance told Fox News he now thought Trump was “a good president. I think he made a lot of good decisions for people, and I think he took a lot of flak.”

Seeking to head off accusations of flip-flopping from opponents and of insufficient loyalty from a Republican party in Trump’s grip, Vance added: “I think that’s the most important thing, is not what you said five years ago, but whether you’re willing to stand up and take the heat and take the hits for actually defending the interests of the American people.”

The Senate seat for which Vance is running will be vacated by Rob Portman, a relatively centrist Republican. Ohio’s other Senate seat is held by the Democrat Sherrod Brown but Trump won the state handily in 2020.

Vance’s credentials as a voice of working-class Appalachia are questioned in some quarters. Reviewing the film adaptation of Hillbilly Elegy last year, Peter Bradshaw of the Guardian called it “a solemn true story of self-betterment from tough beginnings, like the ‘personal statement’ that an American teenager would put on an application to an Ivy League college”.

When Hillbilly Elegy surged up the charts, Vance spoke to the journalist Matt Lewis.

“The reason, ultimately, that I am not” a Trump voter, he said, “is because I think that [Trump] is the most-raw expression of a massive finger pointed at other people.”