By Mashable | Created at 2025-03-05 20:04:03 | Updated at 2025-03-10 08:36:54
4 days ago
The internet is united in one cause—turning Vice President JD Vance into a big baby through viral edits.
Babyface JD Vance Credit: @DaveMcNamee3000 on X
Online, the citizens of America are uniting — not for peace, not for progress, not to defend itself, but for a Vice President who is edited to look like a Gerber baby.
Tweet may have been deletedIt's hard to pinpoint an exact starting point for the JD Vance babyface edits, but Know Your Meme attributes it to X user @DaveMcNamee3000, who posted an edited photo of Vance with a rounder face and larger cheeks on Oct. 2, 2024.
"For every 100 likes I will turn JD Vance into a progressively apple-cheeked baby," the user wrote, to the tune of thousands of reposts and hundreds of thousands of likes. Vance got babier. He got apple-cheekier. The internet joined in. The meme snowballed.
But it seems to have reached a fever pitch this week after Vance, on Feb. 28, asked Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy if he had "said thank you once" during a meeting between them and President Donald Trump in front of the White House Press Pool. This, X users opined, does sound like something perhaps a baby would say; it is reminiscent of a child refusing to invite you to their birthday party; it is, at best, odd work for the Vice President of the United States.
The internet responded with an electric number of memes depicting the politician as a big, big, baby.
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Tweet may have been deleted Tweet may have been deleted Tweet may have been deleted Tweet may have been deleted Tweet may have been deleted Tweet may have been deleted Tweet may have been deletedPerhaps what is most remarkable about the trend isn't its oddity but its ability to bring both sides of the political spectrum together. Research from the Carnegie Endowment, for instance, shows that Americans are emotionally polarized, meaning they "harbor [a] strong dislike for members of the other party," an experience often attributed to social media.
But occasionally, social media can give us a bit of respite from that polarization. For instance, these baby-faced memes of Vice President JD Vance.
Making fun of the Republican Vice President might seem like the job for, well, not Republicans, but that's not exactly true. As one post on X pointed out, "Edited fatty JD Vance is the first meme template in a long while where I don’t know if the person sharing it is someone on the Left, or the most virulent Nazi you’ve ever met in your entire life. The entire political spectrum is enjoying these memes, it’s impossible to know."
Tweet may have been deletedYou might think, well, that's just one guy. And that might be true, but the top response is another user who wrote, "It's relatively easy to know, the left can't meme." (The left notoriously can, in fact, meme.) This obviously turned into an Internet Fight.
While not every conservative's post about JD Vance supports the meme, it is beautiful to see us all come together for one unifying cause: JD Vance with a big baby face.
Christianna Silva is a senior culture reporter covering social platforms and the creator economy, with a focus on the intersection of social media, politics, and the economic systems that govern us. Since joining Mashable in 2021, they have reported extensively on meme creators, content moderation, and the nature of online creation under capitalism.
Before joining Mashable, they worked as an editor at NPR and MTV News, a reporter at Teen Vogue and VICE News, and as a stablehand at a mini-horse farm. You can follow her on Bluesky @christiannaj.bsky.social and Instagram @christianna_j.
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