J.D. Vance’s Online Humiliation Is Soaring to New and Impressive Heights

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James David Vance is an American vice president. He’s a hillbilly, an elegist, and a Yale Law School graduate. But Vance is also a millennial, a scroller, and a poster. Even from his newfound perch on Pennsylvania Avenue, the veep logs on to X to vent. “These people are such idiots,” he wrote of the New York Post Tuesday. The day prior, he posted the Pepe Silvia meme from It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, asserting that Sen. Chris Murphy is engaging in conspiracy theories about Trump’s coziness with Vladimir Putin. And he recently posted a few fire emojis to express his pleasure at the Senate confirmation of FBI Director Kash Patel.

In other words, Vance speaks the language of the millennial internet. So the latest social media trend must be simply devastating for him.

Images of Vance have sprouted up on X contorting his face into that of, well, everything you can imagine. This week, pictures of a chubby-faced Vance were ubiquitous; not so much a fat edit of the vice president as it is as if someone photoshopped an overweight middle schooler’s countenance on his besuited figure. This pubescent Vance has been adorned with a rainbow propeller hat and a swirly lollipop, morphed into a patriotic Minion from Despicable Me, and rendered as lisping Hans Landa, the Nazi villain from Inglourious Basterds. He’s a beautiful woman, a curly-haired puffer fish of a man, a Furby, and of course a shrugging Kevin James.

The memes are everywhere. “Twitter is fucking unusable,” one user wrote. “Im trying to get updates on whether world war 3 is on but all im seeing are fat JD vance memes.” Someone replied with an image of 27 different Vances all agreeing in unison. “I have completely forgotten what the real JD Vance looks like at this point,” another user posted.

Vance has not acknowledged these memes—I mean, why would he? But they are unavoidable for someone who spends ungodly hours on the internet each day. When the vice president scrolls on his phone, does he stare into a fun-house mirror, where he’s been stretched into forms once thought unimaginable?

The beauty of social media’s algorithmic culture is that engagement of any kind often begets more of that content in one’s feed. Every time Vance clicks on a picture of himself, even out of disgust, it’ll catalyze the system to show him even more. (It’s a special kind of torture we’ve built, isn’t it?)

The Vance edits are a vice presidential body horror, a dysmorphic smattering of ridicule seemingly from all sides of the Vance-loathing political spectrum. But perhaps the sharpest barbs take aim at Vance’s very real performance in the Oval Office, where he berated Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky on Friday, falsely claiming that the visiting leader never thanked the United States for its support of Ukraine. “Have you said thank you once?” asked Vance as the red Teletubby. “Tony I want him taxed, he didn’t say thank you,” he told Tony Soprano. “YOU SHOULDA SAID PWEASE,” Chubby Vance told off-screen Zelensky in a now-iconic Oval Office pic.

The reality is that the Vance edits will never be as embarrassing as what the vice president said to one of our most crucial allies, a man who has spent years defending his country from unwarranted Russian aggression. The fun-house mirror can’t really hurt Vance. Only he has that power.