https://x.com/TheAtlantic/status/1898769519557890207
The online right has a fondness for J. D. Vance. So why are right-wing accounts posting memes of the vice president that make him look like a doofus? @alibreland reports: https://t.co/vYFAZpZTRs
— The Atlantic (@TheAtlantic) March 9, 2025
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These memes first appeared in October, when a user on X posted an image of Vance captioned: "For every 100 likes I will turn JD Vance into a progressively apple cheeked baby." But baby-faced Vance has gone fully viral since last week, when the vice president clashed with Ukraine's president, Volodymyr Zelensky, in the Oval Office. Many of the photos, the most popular of which have received tens of thousands of likes on platforms such as X and Instagram, include captions that imagine Vance talking like a small child who cannot yet properly pronounce his words: "You have to say pwease and tank you, Mistow Zensky."
Of course, people love making memes that portray their political adversaries as hapless and incompetent. That's not exactly what's happening with these images of Vance. The memes are going viral on the left-wing internet. But they are equally, if not more, popular on the right. Explicitly pro-Trump accounts on X that otherwise spend their time bashing liberals are posting embarrassing memes of their party's second in command.
No, the right doesn't appear to be posting unflattering memes of Vance because it has turned on him. As I wrote when Vance joined the Republican ticket, he uniquely appeals to various factions across the party. The online right, in particular, has long appreciated Vance's recognition of it (he follows some of its most prominent accounts on X, such as Bronze Age Pervert).
So why is the right willing to make fun of one of its own with memes? One user on X who goes by the name Aelfred the Great and frequently shares right-wing memes has been posting and reposting the unflattering viral images of the vice president. "They're just funny," he told me when I asked him about them. For what it's worth, Vance seems to agree, or at least says he does. On Thursday, he told a reporter for The Blaze that he thinks the memes are "funny." Others on the right swear that by posting images of Vance as a man-baby, they're actually helping him. "The right is having so much fun roasting Vance's baby fat that it's just completely neutered the left's capacity to make fun of him," one right-wing account, @martianwyrdlord, wrote in a post that garnered about 22,000 likes on X. "This feels like a precursor to Vance's inevitable presidency," Auron MacIntyre, a prominent MAGA influencer, posted. "He will have been so thoroughly memed that he becomes immune to the effect before ever entering office."
It wouldn't be the first time that politicos have tried something like this. The "Dark Brandon" memes of Joe Biden and the coconut-pilled memes of Kamala Harris initially started out as right-wing attempts to denigrate the Democrats. "Dark Brandon" caricatured Biden's reputation on the right as a doddering old man by imagining that he harbored a secret personality as a cold-blooded killer. And "coconut-pilled" began when the right harped on a clip of Harris recounting how her mother had once said the phrase "You think you just fell out of a coconut tree." Harris then awkwardly laughed.
Both the Biden and Harris memes eventually made their way to Democrats, who tried to lean in to the jokes. Biden supporters made memes that earnestly portrayed him as a savvy, Machiavellian political operator (with laser eyes, of course). Harris supporters started putting coconut and palm-tree emoji in their display names on social media, calling themselves "coconut-pilled." This strategy seemed successful at the time. As my colleague Charlie Warzel noted when people first started coconut posting, the memes had an "authentic" and "maybe even fun" energy to them. In both instances, it felt like Democrats could take a joke and even spin it around to their favor. In the end, this tactic did not work out. Biden's age caught up with him, and Harris's folksy awkwardness didn't seem to charm voters.
The Vance memes might work against the vice president even more. There is no silver lining to looking like a doofus. As trivial as they might seem, memes about politicians can be telling. "Dark Brandon" memes wouldn't have been quite as funny if Biden was actually sharper and quicker than he seemed. "Coconut-pilled" memes wouldn't have endured if Harris didn't frequently say bizarre and confusing things. Whether or not they consciously realized it, by spreading such memes, liberals were copping to some uncomfortable truths about the politicians they supported. The Vance memes seem to contain an admission as well: that even some conservatives do not see him as essential to the current MAGA movement.
Consider the fact that Democrats have long tried to embarrass Trump with memes and images of him as an infant, a Cheeto, and other forms. None of it has really stuck, even ironically, on the right. Trump's own base just doesn't see him that way, and they instead often make memes portraying him as heroic and muscular. But for a vice president who was picked with widespread support in his party, Vance, at times, has almost seemed like a fringe figure in Trump's second term. He is, of course, overshadowed by the president himselfβbut also by Elon Musk, who is gutting the federal bureaucracy through his Department of Government Efficiency, and by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has legions of fans as part of his "Make America healthy again" movement. Vance might nominally be more powerful than Musk and Kennedy, but he's easier to forget about.
That might be why the memes of baby-faced Vance have been so popular. Vance has taken such a back-seat role in the administration that when he tried to assert himself in the Zelensky meeting, it did look slightly forced and unnaturalβlike a child trying to boss around a group of adults. The best jokes always have a kernel of truth in them. The same goes for memes.
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