The Surprising Reason These Wild JD Vance Memes Keep Spreading

If you are online right now, the JD Vance you are likely seeing is not the one who is the vice president of the United States.

Instead, Vance’s face is being edited into memes that make him look childlike or absurd. He is now a Minion or a Shrek character holding a lollipop, or the child character who turns into a blueberry in “Willy Wonka.” In some memes, Vance’s facial features are exaggerated so his eyes are bulging, his cheeks are swelling, or he transforms into an entirely new creature like a Furby.

Will, who asked HuffPost not to share his full name and is behind the social media account “Kristi Yamaguccimane,” created one of the popular iterations after reading an X post about how a Vance meme could change the course of your life. Immediately, Will thought of a bald-headed Vance as the Las Vegas sphere.

“There’s nothing guiding it but impulse,” Will told HuffPost about why he made a meme of Vance as a Las Vegas attraction.

Vance memes have existed before Vance won the vice presidency. This recent trend began when Rep. Mike Collins (R-Ga.) posted an image of Vance with an exaggerated chiseled jawline in October ― which prompted a social media strategist named Dave McNamee to counter this hypermasculine image with meme caricatures that exaggerated Vance’s features as a “progressively apple cheeked baby,” according to McNamee.

But the Vance meme distribution got turbocharged after Vance’s on-camera confrontation with Ukraine President Zelensky in February over Zelensky not being sufficiently grateful for U.S. support. Since then, Vance memes have taken over social media timelines.

When Vance said “Have you said thank you?” to Ukraine President Zelensky, this action “made him ripe for riffing,” Will said, making fun of “the giant toddler-looking man he is. Vance is incredibly inauthentic and people like making fun of inauthenticity.”

But Will noted that meme-making “is not coherent in motivation or political ideology.”

And it’s true. Vance memes are being shared by both people who are making Vance look like a child because they believe he acted like one in the Oval Office and by far-right supporters who believe this is making the vice president more relatable. “His face is just good fodder,” Will said.

At their best, memes riff on each other, and the Vance memes are increasingly becoming more surreal. The power in a meme is how it is “a big game of creativity and one-upmanship,” Will said. The more it is shared online, the more its ideas take root in your brain. Some posters have noted that they have forgotten what the real Vance even looks like.

Last weekend, Vance responded to his memes with a meme. But unlike the caricatures that make his face look swollen, Vance transposed his face onto Oscar-winning actor Leonardo DiCaprio pointing at the screen from the movie “Once Upon A Time In Hollywood.”

“I think Vance killed it in that moment. Things move fast and nothing moves something to the end of its cycle faster than the uncool guy who’s at the center of it trying to play it off like he isn’t offended at being photoshopped as a minion,” Will said. “It’s like a parent trying to use slang from a younger generation.”

Is seeing Vance’s face on the Las Vegas Sphere or as a shrugging Kevin James making him more relatable or less powerful? Meme researcher Lucía-Pilar Cancelas-Ouviña, a professor of didactics of language and literature at the University of Cadiz, said that it would take more time and research to know if being a meme affects credibility. In general, being a meme can be an “immediate reality check” about how you are being perceived, Cancelas-Ouviña said.

“Memes can weaken his political figure because he loses respect and becomes an object of ridicule,” she said.

That’s because memes are an internet language to communicate light-hearted jokes, but they have a surprising subversive power, too. They can cut you down or bolster you up. Political memes, for example, helped to popularize the idea of a Trump presidency as not only possible but inevitable in 2016.

Meme researchers have also found that we often use the relatable, cathartic humor of memes during a crisis like the COVID pandemic.

“We use memes to communicate the deep uncertainties, fears and desires of our times,” explained Shana MacDonald, a University of Waterloo communication arts professor who has authored research on people creating COVID memes during times of deep uncertainty. “They are relatable, they help us to know we are not alone, they help us to find our online communities.”

Memes can help you channel your frustrations into art that will make you laugh so you do not cry. If you find Vance’s rise to power upsetting, photoshopping Vance’s likeness in silly locations and as silly cartoons may be “a way of perhaps de-charging the situation and the kinds of fear or uncertainty he may evoke for people at a disadvantage from the policies he publicly supports,” MacDonald said.

And in this current climate, amidst fears of a recession and a rollback of civil rights, the one meme that is connecting angry, excited and scared Americans is a meme ridiculing the vice president.

Or as one X poster of Vance memes put it: In “turbulent times, this is what unites us.”