JD Vance admitted that he has seen the flood of memes making fun of him over the last week.
Social media users can’t stop editing photos to depict the vice president as a round-faced baby, an emo rocker, an alien, a toddler with a propeller hat and gargantuan lollipop, the painter Bob Ross, a minion from Despicable Me—and just about anything else you can possibly imagine.
Now, Vance has broken his silence on the mass online humiliation campaign. He has seen the memes and he thinks it is a funny trend, he told Julio Rosas, a reporter for the conservative media outlet The Blaze, on Thursday.
The first memes mocking Vance first started cropping up minutes after last week’s contentious meeting between Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, President Donald Trump, and the vice president.
The conversation’s tensions broke into a shouting match after Vance leveled a pointed question at the country’s leader: “Have you said thank you once?”
(It turns out that Zelensky has, in fact, thanked the U.S. for its support of the Ukrainian war effort against Russia many, many times.)
While the White House’s X account tried to spin Vance’s question as a strong-man leader rightfully taking an ungrateful ally to task, the rest of the platform saw the moment as ripe for mockery.
One of the first posts to go viral, earning 13 million views on X, showed Vance, his face artificially inflated and grinning, saying: “You have to say pwease and tank you, Mistow Zensky.”
Many of the memes in the initial wave still stuck to the original joke. Each successive iteration showed Vance with an even huskier face saying something even more naively sanctimonious.
As is the nature of internet trends, it wasn’t long before the Vance memes spun out of control—with users inventing nearly every possible bizarre variant of the American vice president that could ever be dreamt up.
The trend has become so ubiquitous that some social media users are struggling to see anything other than bizarro Vances on their feeds.
One wrote, “twitter is f---ing unusable. im trying to get updates on whether world war 3 is on but all im seeing are fat JD vance memes.”
Other people remarked that it was getting hard identify actual pictures of Vance amid the deluge of edited photos.
“I have completely forgotten what the real JD Vance looks like at this point,” one user wrote, alongside a photo of a rotund Vance with long curls.
Vance’s decision to (at least publicly) take the relentless mockery in stride probably shouldn’t come as a surprise. The vice president is a 40-year-old millennial who dabbles in meme-posting himself. Just earlier this week, he shared a boilerplate meme (originating from the dark comedy series It’s Always Sunny) to downplay attempts to portray Trump as Putin’s puppet as mere conspiracy-theorizing.
Vance seems to understand that the one sure-fire way to guarantee that the online ridicule proliferates even more fervently, if that’s possible, would be to admit that it bothers him.
