(Radio Iowa) – A U.S. Senator from Ohio who once called Donald Trump “reprehensible” and an “idiot” is now the former president’s running mate. Reports say J.D. Vance even referred to Trump as “America’s Hitler” in a Facebook post, but that’s all water under the political bridge, according to Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley. Vance wrote a bestselling memoir released in 2016 called “Hillbilly Elegy” and Grassley calls Vance the “essence of success.”

“I think his life tells more than anything else about what he can bring to the ticket,” Grassley says. “He evidently was raised by a grandmother. A father abandoned in the family. His mother was an addict. That’s an awful environment to be brought up in.”

Vance served in the U.S. Marine Corps, graduated from Ohio State, went on to earn a law degree from Yale, and was elected to the Senate in 2022. Grassley says Vance is the model of endurance who overcame many difficult challenges. “That’s the problems of a lot of Americans today,” Grassley says. “And understand when you come from a poor background to be successful like he has, that’s pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps. That’s pretty American. So I think he brings that to ticket.”

Vance is on record having been a very public critic of Trump, but Grassley says it’s all a matter of context. “I don’t have in mind everything he said, but I’ve been reminded of a lot of it very recently,” Grassley says, “but I think that he continues to be a stark contrast to Biden’s bad policies and policies are what’s going to win this election for us.”

Grassley says Trump was an unproven political commodity when he first announced his run for president in the summer of 2015. He says many people were like Vance, doubting whether Trump could do the job. “Then he’s president for four years, and you find out how he can deliver. And that’s what J.D. Vance has done. He’s found out that Trump was different than what he thought he was when he said those things,” Grassley says. “It’s just an evolution of a political career, and he’s apologized even to the president for it.”

Grassley met with members of the Iowa delegation in Milwaukee on Sunday and Monday but does not plan to return to the Republican National Convention this week. He says he’s been to eight of them over the decades and “it’s a madhouse.”