JD Vance Memes Bloat the Internet but Miss the Point

Absurd edits of Vice President JD Vance have ballooned across social media in the week following the disastrous televised meeting between him, President Trump, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky at the Oval Office last Friday, February 28. Latching onto Vance’s petulant and interruptive demands that Zelensky thank the United States for its aid throughout the deadly Russian invasion, users on X, Instagram, and other platforms have short-circuited algorithms with an onslaught of yassified and chubbified versions of the vice president’s headshot or other documented appearances.

Ranging from images that liken Vance to a universally familiar rotund little boy who is too eager to be the hallway line leader to those that make him the popular subject of DeviantArt-esque obesity fetish art, the overarching theme of this meme cycle is a fixation over his physique and facial structure. Though there are a few popular edits that render him as a lip filler diva who lost his hair along the way, a Minion, and The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl in 3-D (2005) villain Mr. Electric among other things, the overwhelming majority of circulating images equate him to some sort of behemoth flesh mass with a Miley Cyrus 2008 Grammy Awards stare. 

Please note that I’m not coming at this from the same angle as some did when accusing Greta Thunberg of body-shaming when she made fun of Andrew Tate’s small dick energy, but rather from a perspective of … “Okay, and?”

And I’ll absolutely admit that I laughed and liked a few of the original edits that came up on my timeline before realizing they might’ve irrevocably infected my algorithm, but at this point it’s just the Gen Z iteration of “orange man bad!” or pointing out that Trump has tiny hands. Honestly, the couch-sex memes were far funnier and cleverer than this because they attacked him at the very core of who he is, rather than just off-handed jokes that Vance is some poster model for kohl eyeliner. But the fact of the matter is that both trends are just water off of a duck’s back for people like Vance who can only laugh at watching us physically and spiritually bleed out.

One X user called to “set aside our differences, come together, and focus on bullying elon musk and jd vance into a type of body dysmorphia heretofore unseen by man.” But between Vance’s shamelessness and Musk’s alleged chronic ketamine daze, this online bullying doesn’t amount to much. Another point is that just as we made fun of Musk’s barrel chest and 2012 Redditor mannerisms (see: Asperger’s Syndrome), now we’re warping Vance’s cruelty into something so beyond the original problem and blasting the hell out of it.

While it’s practically impossible to take Vance and Musk seriously as their cringeworthy mannerisms don’t garner much public respect, this brand of surface-level humor is too apathetic, a lukewarm coping mechanism meant to turn our biggest threats into digestible jokes in order to process, compartmentalize, or even minimize the harm they’re exacting on all facets of our lives. It’s a miserable attempt at “taking back our power,” or whatever.

Even with their financial and political power, Vance and Musk are actual losers. But in reality, so are we at the moment, and we’re gonna have to do even just a hair better than rekindling early 2000’s-caliber fat-shaming, autism insults, infantilization, and using gender-bending (some memes depict Vance as a drag queen) as the butt of the joke to keep our heads above water.

Honestly, though, all of this meme-ing and even my candid, half-baked analysis of it are just two faces of the same desire, which is: “SOMEBODY (but not me), PLEASE DO SOMETHING ALREADY.”