JD Vance is trying something new: humor.
The vice president attempted to troll Joy Reid on Wednesday after she suggested he was an “affirmative action” admit to Yale Law School.
During an appearance on Don Lemon’s podcast, the former MSNBC host responded to resurfaced remarks made in 2023 by slain conservative activist Charlie Kirk. At the time, Kirk pushed a MAGA talking point claiming that several Black women had only achieved success by “stealing a white person’s slot.”
He specifically named Reid, former first lady Michelle Obama, the late Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, and Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson.
But Reid, a Harvard alumna, served up some theories of her own on Tuesday.
“Maybe… the affirmative action we’ve been getting is white people who are essentially mediocre in scale compared to a Black person, [who are] getting the spot because they want a conservative,” Reid said.
She then zeroed in on Vance, a graduate of Yale Law School from a working-class town in Ohio.
“Maybe the way JD Vance got into Yale is because they were tired of just letting in white men from New York… from all the elite schools, and they wanted an Appalachian white,” she told Lemon.
“That’s how that man got into Yale, I promise you.”
Wednesday morning, Vance fired back—with a meme.
He posted a viral image of himself photoshopped as a round-faced baby, joining in on an ongoing internet trend that has repeatedly mocked him.
The Daily Beast has reached out to Vance’s office for comment.
Months ago, memes of the vice president as a baby, an emo rocker, an alien, a toddler with a propeller hat and gargantuan lollipop, the painter Bob Ross, a minion from Despicable Me flooded social media.
Vance has acknowledged the memes before, telling Julio Rosas, a reporter for the conservative media outlet The Blaze, in March that he found them funny.
But Wednesday marked the first time he joined in on the joke.
The post quickly took off, racking up over 3.8 million views in just two hours and triggering a second wave of memes.
The trend initially exploded minutes after the notorious Oval Office meeting between Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, President Donald Trump, and the vice president.
The conversation’s tensions broke into a shouting match after Vance leveled a pointed question at the country’s leader: “Have you said thank you once?”
Zelensky has, in fact, thanked the U.S. for its support of the Ukrainian war effort against Russia many, many times.
While the White House’s X account tried to spin Vance’s question as a strong-man leader rightfully taking an ungrateful ally to task, the rest of the platform saw the moment as ripe for mockery.
One of the first posts to go viral, earning 13 million views on X, showed Vance, his face artificially inflated and grinning, saying: “You have to say pwease and tank you, Mistow Zensky.”
