Before Going MAGA, J.D. Vance Reportedly Brought Baked Goods to His Trans Friend

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Anti-LGBTQ+ Republicans are all in for their new vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance, but Vance’s former Yale classmates and teachers say he used to be a very different man before buying into the MAGA grift — the type of person who would even deliver baked goods to a transgender friend recovering from surgery.

According to reporting in the New York Times this week, Vance’s actual record at Yale reveals repeated inconsistencies between the person he once was and the views he now professes. Now a vociferous opponent of modern universities, which he has called “expensive day care centers for coddled children,” Vance thrived socially and —eventually — academically at Yale, remembered by some as “warm, personable and even charismatic.” But his former professors, fellow students, and even roommates say Vance has since abandoned any of the principles he once held to ride Donald Trump’s coattails to the White House.

Among those criticizing Vance’s lack of moral rigor is Sofia Nelson, a former classmate and friend of Vance and his wife Usha. Nelson told the Times that they and Vance were previously so close, the Ohio senator delivered “home-baked treats” to their home while they were recovering from top surgery — the sort of thing one might expect from a staunch trans ally, rather than a man who has since referred to queer people as “groomers,” described gender-affirming surgeries as “gruesome,” and declared war on “far-left gender ideology.” For Nelson, the breaking point came when Vance offered vocal support for an Arkansas ban on gender-affirming care in 2021.

The Ohio senator vocally supports anti-trans policies and opposed a law codifying marriage equality.

“It hurt my feelings when he started saying hateful things about trans people,” Nelson told the Times.

Josh McLaurin, a Democratic state senator from Georgia and another classmate who said he no longer talks to Vance, pointed to a years-old text message in which Vance wondered whether Trump was “a cynical asshole like Nixon” or “America’s Hitler” as evidence that Vance had abandoned any pretext of principles. “He realized that the only way that he could realize and give effect to his own anger in politics was to identify with the MAGA movement,” McLaurin opined to the Times. (It’s almost like the Republican Party itself stands for nothing at all!)

Vance himself is not the only one who appears to have thrown out his actual opinions to chase political power. In a post on X, formerly Twitter, Hong Kong-based historian and professor Dr. Peter E. Hamilton expressed dismay for Usha Vance, saying he had once befriended her when they were both Yale-China Teaching Fellows in 2007.

“Usha was a very organized and thoughtful person — serious about teaching and making a difference on issues such as women’s rights,” Hamilton recalled. “Painful for me to see her on the RNC stage now.”

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Originally Appeared on them.