Like many of you, I spend a lot of time texting back and forth with friends. Many of those text chains are now inundated with pictures of JD Vance. Maybe you’ve seen them. There are new ones every day. The bearded Vice President bloats, his eyes grow huge, he’s a carnival grotesque, his chin widening, his shape contorting. Often, he says “pwease.”
I’m obsessed with these pictures. I have dozens saved on my phone and hard drive. There’s goth JD Vance, JD Vance with a giant lollipop, JD Vance as a dying Darth Vader, JD Vance as a nuclear explosion, and JD Vance as chicken McNuggets.
Early Vice Presidential memes emphasized Vance’s smokey eyes and chubby cheeks. Of the two strains, the chubby Vance is now dominant. For months now, I’ve seen pictures of Vance circulating that inflate him. This is typical of what I see now: a grotesque and inflated JD Vance with cold, dead blue eyes staring out at the viewer with horrifying intensity. He looks like a Cabbage Patch Doll that’s been left in the sun.
Vance is the Pepe the Frog of 2025, a political figure mixed and remixed in an endless memetic frenzy. His ever-expanding body and meme-form reminds me of the 4chan-driven meme magic of 2016. What became of Pepe in the end? His creator won some lawsuits and got into NFTs. He died as a meme, mostly, and transformed into Groyper. Pepe was often, but not always, ironically racist. Groyper is just a straight-up racist; the bloated final form of the frog is a favorite among avowed hatemongers like Nick Fuentes.
Vance’s current memetic form resembles that of the Groyper, but somehow less human. Groyper stares at the viewer with a little smile and a twinkle in his eyes. Chubby Vance’s huge eyes empty of everything but malice. A strange thing about the bloated Vance memes is that they cut across the nation’s fraught cultural divide. I’ve seen Vance’s bloated form shared by Nazis, conservatives, and liberals. I’ve seen his putrid form bubbling in the depths of nasty anonymous image boards as well as pleasant queer-friendly Discords.
Vice Presidents often fill a unique role in an administration as a jester. Dan Quayle misspelled potato during an elementary school spelling bee and never lived it down. Harris, Biden, Mike Pence, and Al Gore all took their turns as powerless fools in public perception.
What’s happening to Vance is no different, but it does seem more intense. I think the reason the memes are so popular and cut across partisan lines is that there is something uniquely alien and awful about Vance. He’s been a public figure and the object of ridicule for more than a decade. A parody excerpt of his memoir Hillbilly Elegy led to the Associated Press reporting on a rumor that he’d fucked a couch. Something about us wanted that to be true so badly that the mainstream press reported on it.
The memes, somehow, reflect an essential truth about Vance. My favorite of the bunch, so far, is one that shows off a group of the Chubby caricatures. “And yet a trace of the true self exists in the false self,” the meme reads. This is the heart of it. I imagine the Vice President’s soul is putrid, a barren and vile thing. The memes show me a small fiction that speaks to a deeper truth.
Vance, who is extremely online, says he’s seen the memes. He told a reporter for The Blaze that he thinks it’s a very funny trend.
I’m not laughing with him.
