Inside Vance’s unfiltered ‘err on the side of openness’ social media presence

Former Vice President Al Gore championed the development of the internet so enthusiastically that one of the first myths of the online era was that he claimed to have invented it. 

It was in those early days of the world wide web that one of Gore’s successors came of age.

JD Vance grew up with chat rooms and email and instant messaging. He graduated into young adulthood at the dawn of blogging. He entered politics with a millennial’s fluency in social media. 

Now, at 40, he is the nation’s third-youngest vice president — and, nearly a quarter-century after Gore left office, the nation’s first very online vice president. It’s a pioneering distinction that reflects the serious time and thought, as well as the debate-me vibes, that Vance puts into his interactions with others. 

“I tend to err on the side of openness,” Vance said in a recent interview aboard Air Force Two. “That’s probably a generational thing, right? I come from a very tech-forward generation.”

Vance’s unfiltered use of X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, sets him apart from many of his political peers — and certainly from past vice presidents who were older, far more restrained and far less eager to slide into your mentions. 

Where other elected officeholders rely on staff to send out tightly crafted messages, Vance estimates that, even with a full White House portfolio, he writes 98% of his posts himself. And where President Donald Trump and his hit-and-run blasts have pushed social media into new frontiers of political communication and confrontation, Vance has pushed further. Unlike Trump, he engages directly in conversations with his allies and fights with his critics. He also sticks around to watch reactions pour in, replying when it suits him.

At times, Vance is in on the joke. His recent Oval Office upbraiding of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy ignited a raft of memes in which Vance’s face was edited into a variety of images — flattering or unflattering, depending on the poster’s opinion of him. Vance contributed to the discourse by sharing an image of his face in the well-traveled Leonardo DiCaprio pointing meme — a winking acknowledgement that he was enjoying all of the online fuss.

“It can become very addictive, right?” Vance said of social media. “So I try to limit myself. We limit our kids’ screen time. I try to limit my screen time, too.”

Vance’s posts at times veer into hostility. Last month, after he called for the rehiring of a federal employee who had resigned over making racist remarks online, Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., scolded Vance, noting how they are both fathers of Indian American children.

“For the sake of both of our kids? Grow up,” Vance replied. “Racist trolls on the internet, while offensive, don’t threaten my kids. You know what does? A culture that denies grace to people who make mistakes. A culture that encourages congressmen to act like whiny children.”

He accused Khanna of “emotional blackmail” before concluding: “You disgust me.”

While Vance and his advisers characterize his social media persona as a worthy effort to foster authentic discussion and debate, his detractors view it as abrasive and performative.

“I have no problem with him being active on social media and engaging in conversation with critics,” Khanna said in an interview. “I’m not hoping here for Lincoln-Douglas. I wish he were using it to have an actual substantive exchange instead of trying to own the libs in every tweet.”

Aboard Air Force Two, Vance wrestled with his social media habits, at one point calculating how much time he spends online and at another volunteering that he is trying to read more books.

“I actually try not to look at it most of the day,” he said. “When I’m in my office in the West Wing, I usually have my phone in a secure box, because people come in, there’s classified information flowing everywhere. I sort of assume the Chinese or somebody else are hacked into my phone.”

But it’s tough to resist a morning or afternoon scroll. 

“I’ll take 15 minutes just to make sure I’m staying up to date on the news and I know what’s going on,” Vance said. “I’m probably a little bit more active after the kids go to bed, right between 8 and 11.”

Stormy posts, ‘Always Sunny’ memes

Since being sworn in as vice president two months ago, Vance has posted from his personal @JDVance X account more than 140 times, including reposts and replies to other accounts. 

In that same period, the official @VP handle that is managed by his office has posted roughly 250 times, with a heavy concentration on traditional statements, as well as reposts of content from other Trump administration officials and White House-affiliated accounts.

While he averages fewer than three posts a day from his personal account, Vance often maximizes them by taking advantage of the unlimited characters he’s afforded as a verified user. He is known for seeking out thought leaders and others whose beliefs place them outside the bounds of Trump’s right-wing ideology and his reluctance to involve the U.S. in Russia’s war against Ukraine. 

Over two days last month, Vance tapped out more than 850 words in a pair of posts that chided Niall Ferguson of the Hoover Institution, a hawkish vestige of the old-guard Republican economic and foreign policy establishment. Ferguson had slammed Trump’s approach to the war in Ukraine. Ferguson did not mention Vance in his original post, but the vice president nevertheless locked in on it, decrying it as “moralistic garbage.”

On Presidents’ Day, Vance replied to former MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan, who had referred to Vance’s rebuke of European free speech laws and asked if he was aware of the White House limiting access to Associated Press reporters.

“Yes dummy,” Vance wrote. “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!”

And though Vance said he locks his phone away for much of the workday, several of his more colorful missives have come on weekdays from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. 

When Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., posted a clip of a recent CNN appearance in which he accused the White House of being too cozy with Russian President Vladimir Putin, Vance clapped back with a Monday morning “Charlie Conspiracy” meme from the sitcom “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.”

“More politicians should be accessible and responsive,” said Khanna, who, like Murphy and Vance, is viewed as a potential presidential candidate in 2028. “I don’t see it as a waste of time or a disservice. It’s the manner in which he’s doing it. … That’s the problem.”

A reply guy is born

Vance has always been eager to express himself online. 

In the aughts and early 2010s he dabbled as a blogger — first as an amateur Blogspot author during his days in the Marines and at Yale Law School, later at a site led by former George W. Bush speechwriter David Frum. 

His earliest days on social media are tougher to excavate. Vance acknowledged during his 2022 Senate campaign in Ohio that he had deleted his old tweets, including those critical of Trump. 

“In 4 years, I hope people remember that it was those of us who empathized with Trump’s voters who fought him most aggressively,” Vance wrote in a since-scrubbed post from 2016. 

The posts Vance wrote and interacted with in those days, when he was best known for his memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy,” previewed the range he would offer as his political instincts developed. His tweets then were a mix of lighter fare in line with the childless young professional he was at the time — he goofed on an Obama White House post playing off the Disney film “Frozen” — and the punchiness he would hone as he made his sharp right turn. 

“This is a pretty insane tweet,” he wrote in response to a December 2016 post by liberal columnist Paul Krugman that suggested Trump could benefit from a 9/11-style attack.

Vance’s online posture became more combative as he transitioned from anti-Trump Republican to Trump-backed candidate and U.S. senator.

While disparaging Democratic leaders as “childless cat ladies” in 2021 — an attack that came back to haunt him in his early days as Trump’s running mate — Vance fired off a tweet that included Krugman in the smear. In the years since, he has embraced the role of reply guy. 

“If you weren’t such a humorless scold you might be a senator right now,” he tweeted at Jason Kander, a past Democratic Senate candidate in Missouri who had mocked a photo of Vance pointing a rifle toward the sky in 2023 as a Chinese spy balloon flew over the U.S.

Anyone who wondered whether Vance would change his freewheeling ways after winning the vice presidency got their answer soon after November’s election. When Grace Chong, an associate of influential MAGA movement leader Steve Bannon, criticized him for missing a Senate vote on then-President Joe Biden’s judicial nominees, Vance fired back. 

“Grace Chong,” he wrote on X, in a post that he later deleted, “is a mouth breathing imbecile who attacks those of us in the fight rather than make herself useful.”

The angel on Vance’s social media shoulder

Second lady Usha Vance has urged her husband to be nicer on social media — advice he is not always keen to take, he told activists at last month’s Conservative Political Action Conference.

“I take it sometimes!” he said when reminded of the comment on Air Force Two.

If his wife is the angel on his social media shoulder, who is the devil? The second lady, who was seated across from her husband on the plane and until that point in the interview had quietly kept her head down, looked up in amusement after hearing the question. 

“I guess I have a few,” Vance responded, after repeating it.

“The only time that my staff ever tweets for me,” he continued, nodding toward his communications director, William Martin, “is if I’m in a speech and I say, ‘Hey, Will, can you just make sure a clip of this gets out in real time?’ Or if I’m in meetings all day, ‘Hey, can you say something about this, and say it like that?’ That happens probably 2% of the time. The other 98% of the time, it’s all me. So I guess I don’t have anybody else to blame when I get something wrong.”

Vance has copped to being wrong, at least in his opinion, about Trump in 2016. Yet he has been more stubborn about his unsubstantiated claim last fall on X that Haitian migrants were abducting and eating pets in Springfield, Ohio. When reporters confronted him about the absence of evidence, Vance made no apologies and instead took credit for drawing attention to other problems that immigration had stirred up in his home state.

“There’s a lot of conspiracy theories, some of which turn out to be legitimate, some of which turn out to be totally bats—,” Vance, speaking broadly about the social media landscape, said aboard the plane. “And I guess I just think openness is really important.”

How does he muster the confidence to plow ahead with takes that may be proved wrong? 

“Being wrong is OK,” Vance replied. “I’d rather be open with people and wrong than overly cautious, never take any risks in the service of never getting anything wrong.” 

He added: “It’s OK to change your mind. … I guess my confidence comes from the fact that, if I can argue somewhat successfully with my wife, I assume I can argue well with anybody.”

The second lady, Vance admitted, wishes he would “be a little bit more gentle” online.

“But she’s also encouraged me not to filter myself and not to just become a kind of creature of consultant guidance,” he added. “Politicians, they get way too comfortable with slogans. Yeah, sometimes you need to hammer home a message, but you can’t just do that, or you become a total robot.”