Ironically enough, a divisive moment in the Oval Office last weekend seems to have brought the entire internet together. When Ukrainian president Vladimir Zelensky visited the White House on February 28, ostensibly to hammer out plans for a peace agreement between his country and Russia, he probably didn’t expect to get berated by both Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance. The ensuing, historically fiery exchange appeared to catch him off guard.
Similarly, most people who watched the spectacle play out on live TV may not have expected Vance’s role in it to explode into a meteor shower of memes among people of all political stripes. But that’s exactly what has happened.
“Have you said thank you once” https://t.co/kCNfr59RAn pic.twitter.com/01mm34xg1u
Anyone wandering around X at just about any moment this week is bound to come across images of Vance’s boyish face enhanced to look cartoonishly cherubic. (The surrounding beard adds a perverse dissonance.) The meme pokes fun at how petulant some say Vance came across by getting angry at Zelensky’s insufficient gratitude over U.S. aid that Vance himself had nothing to do with. The archetypal version features an altered Vance sitting smugly in the Oval Office, with a caption that reads: “You have to say pwease and tank you, Mistow Zensky.” As a result, the word ‘pwease’ is now so associated with both the Zelensky meeting and the meme that followed, some X users now refer to Vance as ‘the pwease guy.’
The origins of the JD Vance meme actually predate the doomed Zelensky meeting by many months. It began last October, when Republican congressman Mike Collins tweeted a photo of Vance that had been digitally altered in a flattering way. X users noticed the “yassified” portrait and responded by going in another, decidedly less flattering direction. With ever-weirder alterations of Vance’s face last fall, the kindling for the “pwease” meme spread around the firepit of the internet. All it took was Vance going aggro in the Oval Office to light a match underneath it.
For every 100 likes I will turn JD Vance into a progressively apple cheeked baby pic.twitter.com/WgGS9IhAfY
Throughout this past week, the JD Vance meme continued to evolve, branching out into stranger spaces. It now includes pop culture figures like Pennywise the clown from It, the Teletubbies, and the oafish village boy holding a lollipop in Shrek Forever After, other political leaders including Kim Jong Un, but also increasingly esoteric and abstract variations. (Vance as Las Vegas’s The Sphere, anyone?) However, what may be most strange about the meme—which has gotten so ubiquitous many now claim to have forgotten what Vance’s face actually looks like—is its bipartisan appeal.
Obviously, left-leaning social media users are into infantilizing the Vice President. Not only is it a chance to mock the opposition, but an indirect way to show support for Ukraine in their war with Russia. It’s no wonder popular accounts like anti-Trump media group Meidas Touch and even The Daily Show have gotten in on the action. Less obvious is why Vance’s supporters are also into the meme. Polymarket, a MAGA-friendly, Peter Thiel-backed betting platform has put Vance memes in multiple tweets throughout the week, for instance, and many of the Vice President’s fans suspect the hyper-online Vance is enjoying his own memedom. (At least one reporter’s account backs that up.)
“actually i think it’s good that people are making me look insane” is a very funny way to play this https://t.co/IYHs4Q4hql pic.twitter.com/CJ0eC3NKZW
It’s unclear exactly why the online right has embraced a meme targeting one of their own. The most generous explanation is that they’re still ebullient from last November’s victory, and secure enough in their party’s current dominance to admit these images are funny. Another possibility is that the 4Chan-bred, meme-savvy faction of Trump’s base never much cared for Vance—either because of his former resistance to Trump or for more disgusting reasons—and are happy to throw him under the bus for the sake of some lulz. Some X users, however, claim their embrace of the JD Vance meme is a way to neutralize the left’s use of it. If Vance’s supporters are also in on the joke, the logic suggests, they can’t also be stung by it. (As when liberals repurposed the Biden-bashing “Let’s Go, Brandon” into the Dark Brandon meme.)
While some X denizens seem pleased that the meme is bringing both sides together, others seem to see it as a zero-sum meme war. When the Never Trump conservative PAC The Lincoln Project tweeted Weird Vance after Tuesday night’s congressional address, one user responded, “It’s only funny when we do it,” and added a slur for good measure.
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