The vice presidency has long been the booby prize of American politics. “My country has in its wisdom contrived for me the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived,” America’s first vice president, John Adams, lamented to his wife in 1793. J. D. Vance has been in office for only 48 days, but he has already found a better use for the largely ceremonial post than many of his predecessors: posting constantly on social media.
Since being sworn in, Vance has opined more than 120 times on X, with some of his missives running hundreds of words long. He has engaged in detailed policy debates, promoted his political allies, and dunked on his critics. Watching the veep unfurl his latest novella on Elon Musk’s platform, many of his progressive critics have smirked: Doesn’t he have better things to do? But mocking Vance’s social-media habit misses its significance.
As the sidekick of a president who charts his own idiosyncratic course, the former senator from Ohio has few avenues for influencing policy and may simply be marking time until he can launch his own bid for the White House. Trump, having decamped to his personal Truth Social platform, has effectively ceded the online arena, and Vance—a New York Times best-selling author and Yale Law–trained debater—has been making the most of it. His posts provide a window into where the vice president thinks the country should go and how he plans to make sure that he is the one to lead it there.
Consider Vance’s careful choice of issues. Since inauguration, he has posted nearly two dozen times critiquing U.S. support for Ukraine, participating in extensive exchanges on the subject. He has never once mentioned Gaza. This is no accident. Cutting off Ukraine unites a large majority of Republican voters. Trump’s plan to “take over” Gaza and turn it into the “Riviera of the Middle East” is one of the president’s least popular proposals among his supporters.
Vance would surely defend Trump’s Gaza gambit if pressed in a live interview, but the beauty of social media is that he can choose which questions to answer. Trump’s benign neglect of both X and his running mate has allowed Vance to pick his spots. It also allows him to hone in on the worst arguments advanced by the opposition rather than defending the worst ones advanced by his boss and his allies. Where Trump uses social media solely as a one-way broadcast, Vance relishes mixing it up in public, not just posting but replying—often in order to skewer left-wing critics. In doing so, the vice president has flipped the script on anti-Trump media and exposed weaknesses among his cultured despisers.
[Read: The J. D. Vance I knew]
Last month, after Vance told the Munich Security Conference that “you cannot win a democratic mandate by censoring your opponents or putting them in jail,” the progressive media magnate Mehdi Hasan accused him of hypocrisy. “Hey @JDVance, I know you’re busy lecturing the Europeans on free speech,” he wrote on X, “but have you seen this?” Hasan appended a post about the Trump administration banning the Associated Press from the White House briefing room over its refusal to rename the Gulf of Mexico in its coverage. This jibe was nothing new. Since 2016, many left-wing commentators have generated applause on social media by performatively pummeling various Trump officials for their progressive audience. But this time, Vance punched back.
“Yes dummy,” he replied, “I think there’s a difference between not giving a reporter a seat in the WH press briefing room and jailing people for dissenting views. The latter is a threat to free speech, the former is not. Hope that helps!” The riposte quickly went viral, racking up nearly 50 million views, more than 15 times as many as Hasan’s original post.
The rapturous response from conservatives shouldn’t be surprising. Vance’s dunk was a perfect fusion of the poles of the pro-Trump camp—a “yes dummy” for the “own the libs” crowd and a debater’s quip afterward for the National Review set. (The vice president conveniently did not answer follow-up questions about Musk’s declaration that week that the makers of 60 Minutes deserved “a long prison sentence.”)
That Vance momentarily got the better of Hasan, himself a potent persuasive force, says less about Hasan than about the general flabbiness of left-liberal media’s approach to Trump. Faced with a shambolic first Trump administration—which didn’t expect to win, wasn’t prepared to make its case to the public, and had alienated many of the most capable mainstream Republicans—Democratic-aligned politicians and pundits have been playing on easy mode since 2016. Operating within the monocultures of academia and media, many of those on the center-left spent more time fending off attacks from their left than worrying about challenges from their right.
Today, the situation could not be more different. Trump has united the Republican Party behind him, and while his administration still has its substantial share of cranks, it also has the benefit of more effective spokespeople—not just Vance, but media-savvy figures such as Secretary of State Marco Rubio and United Nations Ambassador-Designate Elise Stefanik. And with the information landscape no longer dominated by a few establishment outlets and channels, the administration is able to circumvent legacy media and use podcasts and platforms like X to amplify its message. The game has changed, and Trump’s critics will have to change with it, or get rolled by the likes of Vance.
But just because the rules of engagement have shifted doesn’t mean that Vance will end up the winner. Social media can just as easily delude its users as enlighten them. Whether left or right, internet-poisoned campaigns tend to lose because they convince political partisans marinating among the like-minded on X or Bluesky that their most polarizing positions are ascendant when they are actually alienating to many everyday voters. This is why campaigns that mistake social-media virality for electoral reality often self-destruct, as Florida Governor Ron DeSantis learned the hard way in his presidential bid.
[Read: DeSantis is making the same mistake Democrats did in 2020]
Venturing too far into the Very Online vortex risks leaving behind the people who actually put Trump in office. Many of his voters have no investment in the MAGA universe and its culture-war obsessions; they just want a better economy and less immigration. A successful politician today needs to know how to use social media without being used by it—to appeal to their partisan base without being captured by it.
If anyone is up for this task, it’s Vance. The vice president is used to being the outlier in the room—whether as a conservative in liberal spaces like Yale Law, or as a hillbilly from Appalachia in the halls of Washington and Silicon Valley. He has extensive experience making his case to diverse and often hostile audiences. Indeed, Vance’s meteoric rise from little-known law student to vice president is a master class in political persuasion.
First he ensnared Never Trump Republicans and bemused liberals searching for a Trump whisperer from the heartland to explain the 2016 election. Then he won over the likes of Tucker Carlson and Donald Trump Jr., who helped him secure the 2024 VP nod. He has played the pugilist provocateur on conservative podcasts and the civil conciliator on the vice-presidential debate stage. Now Vance has set his sights on the Republican Party itself, using social media as a 21st-century bully pulpit to outmaneuver his conservative rivals and liberal critics, and unite the base behind his leadership.
None of this will matter if Trump 2.0 tanks and Vance is seen as an accomplice to national catastrophe. Precisely because he has so little authority, Vance’s fortunes are hostage to those who do. But if the administration completes its term without utterly discrediting itself, the country’s first vice president of social media will be well positioned for a promotion. Maybe all John Adams needed was an X account.