Vice President JD Vance quietly tried to help Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign stop then-Republican nominee Donald Trump from reaching the White House, according to an intermediary to that campaign who described the episode to Vanity Fair in a profile of Vance’s years at Yale Law School published September 16, 2026.
Vance, 42, was a very different political figure then. Fresh off the publication of his memoir “Hillbilly Elegy” in 2016, he was a prominent conservative critic of the Republican nominee, warning in a Facebook message to a friend that Trump could become “America’s Hitler” and likening him to “cultural heroin” in an article for The Atlantic. Vance ultimately voted for independent candidate Evan McMullin.
Two Calls and a Back Channel
The intermediary said Vance phoned him and asked to be connected to Jake Sullivan, then a senior policy adviser to Clinton, the former first lady and secretary of state. Sullivan went on to serve as national security adviser under President Joe Biden and now teaches at Harvard. The first approach went nowhere — Sullivan was too busy, the intermediary said he replied — but Vance called back.
The Rust Belt Apology He Pitched
Vance’s prescription, as the intermediary described it, was a hard turn toward the Midwestern states that decided the race. He named Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania — the group now commonly called the Blue Wall — and argued that rather than campaigning in Miami alongside the singer Beyoncé, Clinton should go there and apologize for the Iraq War, and for the sons and fathers from communities like his own who were sent to fight and then forgotten.
Clinton had voted in 2002 for the resolution authorizing President George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq and had already said she regretted it, including in her 2014 memoir. She never staged the Rust Belt apology tour Vance sketched out. The conversation with Sullivan took place six weeks before the November 2016 election, weeks after Clinton told a New York City fundraiser that half of Trump’s supporters belonged in a “basket of deplorables.” A person close to Sullivan said he does not recall the apology idea being raised, but confirmed the two men discussed the fallout from that remark, with Vance pressing the view that the candidate needed to sharpen her focus.
Trump, who beat Clinton that November, still returns to the line. In August 2026 he revived the “deplorables” attack at length, calling it the moment that finished her campaign.
Vance’s Office Rejects the Framing
Vance spokesperson Taylor Van Kirk did not dispute that the conversations happened. Plenty of people sought the vice president’s advice in 2016, she said, noting that he never worked for a campaign and that he urged Republicans and Democrats alike to pay attention to working-class towns such as Middletown, Ohio. “We 100 percent reject the characterization that he was trying to help Hillary win,” Van Kirk said.
The Mentor Who Sees No Change
The back-channel account surfaced in a profile by writer Chris Whipple that traces Vance’s transformation to a contracts class in the fall of 2010 at Yale’s Sterling Law Building. Amy Chua, the professor who would publish “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother” a few months later, taught it. Usha Chilukuri, raised by Telugu Indian immigrants and already tagged as the standout of the class of 2013, sat near the front. A burly former Marine from Middletown whom some classmates doubted would make a lawyer sat toward the back. Vance collected his Yale Law degree in 2013, and Chilukuri, now his wife, graduated in the same class.
Chua, who rarely talks publicly about her most famous student, said she saw promise in the rumpled first-year despite the pink or purple sweater he turned up in, and she and her husband, Yale Law constitutional scholar Jed Rubenfeld, later predicted he would end up in the White House. She also pushed back on the standard reading of his politics. “I do not think he changed at all,” Chua said. A friend of the vice president says there are two people whose calls he always takes: Trump and Chua.
Not everyone is so charitable. Stuart Stevens, who ran Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign, cast Vance as a man with no fixed convictions, willing to attach himself to whatever politics carried him upward. The turn came in 2021, when Vance threw in with Trump and the MAGA movement; he won a U.S. Senate seat in 2022 with Trump’s endorsement and joined the ticket as his running mate in 2024. When the comparison resurfaced in 2022, a spokesperson said it no longer reflected his views. A friend from law school, describing the February 2025 Oval Office blowup with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, said Vance is poor at faking warmth toward people he dislikes.
Vance is the favorite to become his party’s presidential nominee in 2028, which makes the 2016 back channel more than a footnote.