There’s a politician in the West Wing using social media to drive news cycles, insult the IQs of his detractors, tell Democratic foes they “disgust” him and post occasionally misspelled, often off-message content.
And it’s not Donald Trump.
JD Vance, the first millennial vice president who rose to national prominence in 2016 through his intricately framed and professionally edited political memoir Hillbilly Elegy, has established himself as a smashmouth poster in the early weeks of the second Trump administration.
His use of the medium — reminiscent of how Trump weaponized social media during his first term — points to a norm-breaking approach to political communication that goes beyond Trump, and that Vance is leveraging as the vice president and likely 2028 presidential contender. Unlike his buttoned-down predecessor Mike Pence, who reserved his social media mimicry of Trump to the occasional all-caps or exclamation point— and whose presence in the White House served as something of a counterbalance to the bombastic president — Vance has gone all-in on MAGA warfare and channeling its guttural appeal.
“The president is a trailblazer when it comes to trolling: He is the greatest of all time at it — but the vice president is in the upper echelon,” said Alex Bruesewitz, the prominent MAGA influencer and CEO of X Strategies, a conservative digital marketing firm.
Added Bruesewitz: “JD gets the game. He’s effective at it, and he instinctually gets it.”
As Vance embarks on his first international trip, a test of his diplomacy abroad, he is not employing social media as a tool of diplomacy at home — but rather as a cudgel.
The sheer sweep of Vance’s social media grist spans mid-2000s cultural touchstones to jurisprudence. In recent days, he has feuded with Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) over whether a so-called Department of Government Efficiency employee who resigned after he was linked to racist online comments last year should be re-hired; suggested that federal judges shouldn’t be “allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power”; quoted the movie “Good Will Hunting,” asking how detractors of Trump’s approach to tariffs “liked them apples”; wondered about the copulative mechanics behind a chihuahua-German shepherd mix featured in the Puppy Bowl; mused about how the 2006 Rascal Flats song “Life is a Highway” is a bifurcator for the “two genders”; and misspelled Trump’s name as “Trunp” — while declining to take the post down.
“He is the vice president, but he has continued to be a prolific social media user, in many ways, to his own advantage, and to advance the message of the administration,” said Matthew Bartlett, a GOP strategist and appointee under Trump’s first administration. “But there’s also been some hiccups along the way.”
Asked about Vance’s approach to social media, a spokesperson for the vice president told POLITICO that it fostered authenticity and trust.
“As the most transparent administration in history, President Trump and Vice President Vance are who they are,” said Taylor Van Kirk, Vance’s press secretary. “They believe the American people should be able to see their leaders in action and make up their own minds without any filter from the biased mainstream media.”
Vance’s approach to social media isn’t new: He established himself as MAGA firebrand in 2021 ahead of his U.S. Senate bid. But his perch in the presidential line of succession is.
And he has at least occasionally overstepped, as evidenced by posts he has deleted. After the November election, as he was preparing for the vice presidency, he missed some key Senate votes, leading to criticism from Grace Chong, chief financial officer and chief operating officer for Steve Bannon’s “War Room” show. In a now-deleted post, Vance responded by calling her “a mouth breathing imbecile.”
Vance is something of a digital native. In 2005, on the Blogger platform and under the title “The Ruminations of JD Hamel,” Vance waxed eloquent about the film Garden State, noting that he “couldn’t watch it because New Jersey’s landscape is so much like Ohio’s, the music is so relevant to my life right now, and the story of a guy returning home, realizing that home isn’t what it used to be, etc. made me want to tear up.” Later, he defined himself as a young blogger in the early 2010s FrumForum, a blog hosted by former George W. Bush speechwriter David Frum.
His more recent freewheeling use of X has drawn both partisan cheers and jeers. William Wolfe, the Baptist social media influencer and former Trump appointee, joked on X that he would one day regale his son with tales of Vance’s posting prowess: “One of the greatest.” Ron Filipkowski, the editor-in-chief of the anti-Trump website MeidasTouch, posted that Vance is “getting paid a lot by the government for his job as full-time social media shitposter.”
Like much on polarized social media, where some see a mess, others see art.
“He uses it like a normal person, and not like a stiff politician,” Bruesewitz said. “And it’s pretty evident that it’s him running his account and not some staffer. I don’t think that many politicians can say that.”
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