I’m Mesmerized by J.D. Vance’s Photoshopped Face

If you search “Vance” on X right now, you will not find news about last week’s White House meeting in which the vice-president and President Trump berated Volodymyr Zelenskyy on-camera for failing to sufficiently bend the knee. Nor will you find clips of Vermonters protesting his recent ski vacation, or updates on how his tête-à-tête with the leader of Germany’s far-right party went. Instead, you will see images of J.D. Vance’s face, artificially stretched, bloated, and reddened, Photoshopped onto a Minion — or the Kevin James meme, or Butter Pants from Shrek, or the Las Vegas Sphere.

“For the last time, Mr. Wonka, I did not try any experimental gum, and frankly I find this entire line of questioning insulting.” pic.twitter.com/4WHwKITHXa

— Aelfred The Great (@aelfred_D) March 3, 2025

Welcome to the week of J.D. Vance memes, nearly all of which portray him as either a child in an adult’s body (many incorporate rainbow propeller hats and comically oversize lollipops) or a neck-bearded adult. These edits are not new; back in October, Representative Mike Collins’s tweet in support of Vance included an attached image that had been altered to make his jawline and chin appear stronger and more pronounced — or, colloquially, more like a Chad. This being an extremely weird thing for a congressman to do, the writer and social-media strategist Dave McNamee started a thread of his own Vance edits, giving him progressively rounder cheeks and smaller eyes. “I posted something about making him chubbier and rounder for every 1,000 likes, and that snowballed into a J.D. Vance body-horror thread that blew up,” McNamee tells me over email. After Trump and Vance’s meeting with Zelenskyy last week, the edits circulated again, this time with an even more absurdist bent.

Why, I asked him, did he think memes of Vance’s face were so much funnier than Trump’s or Musk’s? All three of them have odd-looking faces ripe for unflattering shitposts. None are particularly svelte (some have argued on X that the edits are fatphobic). It’s because, as McNamee says, “He has no power. But he thinks he does. You can dunk on Elon and it’s funny. You can make a Trump joke and it’s whatever. But at this point, they are in charge, so it’s sort of like a big fart, just nothing. J.D. is the punching bag that you can feel some sense of winning by making fun of him.”

There’s a certain 2010s-ness to these memes; the idea that simply Photoshopping a political leader can provide a week’s worth of entertainment is sort of retro and wholesome, recalling an earlier, more innocent era of internet humor when Animal Advice memes were the pinnacle of hilarity and slapping the Impact font on a photo made it instantly funny. Perhaps it’s because that’s the culture Vance was forged from — of message boards and shitposting forums — and therefore using his own native language to insult him is more satisfying. Or, as one tweet reads, “The best thing about this photo is that we know for a fact that Vance is terminally online enough to have seen it.” Because as usual, all J.D. Vance has to do in response, of course, is post through it.

“It’s such an easy own,” says McNamee. “Like, this is a guy who takes himself so seriously.” Juxtaposing an edit of a chubby, childlike Vance with the text, “YOU SHOULDA SAID PWEASE,” then, isn’t just a commentary on his subservience to Trump but a skewering of how lame and transparent his entire “extremely online guy” persona is.

Since October, the Vance edits have only become sweatier, more surreal, more upsetting to behold. He’s been meme’d so much that multiple viral tweets have expressed the difficulty of conjuring up an actual picture of Vance in one’s head because of how much the edits have distorted his image in the collective consciousness. But in the fun-house mirror of the internet, nothing can stay golden for long. McNamee says that as of Tuesday, someone made a memecoin out of one of his Vance edits that soon became worth $20 million. “I cannot tell you how disgusted and weird the whole thing has made me feel,” he says. What’s more, he’s noticed that now even the MAGA folks are getting in on the joke. “The right can take ownership over it as an epic internet win for them,” he says. In this administration, all attention is good attention, even if thousands of people are calling you a big ugly baby.