New Delhi, April 4 -- Some eight years ago, United States Vice President JD Vance was a vocal critic of then-presidential candidate Donald Trump's "protectionist" trade policies, particularly his advocacy for tariffs, asserting that only automation and technological changes were reshaping the economy. JD Vance had also publicly called the Republican businessman an "idiot" and said he was "reprehensible."

Privately, he even compared him to Adolf Hitler.

"I go back and forth between thinking Trump is a cynical a*****e like Nixon who wouldn't be that bad or that he's America's Hitler," he wrote privately to an associate on Facebook in 2016, Reuters reported.

He also directly took aims at trade policies of Donald Trump, saying, "If you're ...