House Speaker Hakeem Jeffries may have thought he was matching fire with fire, but his attempt to weaponize internet humor against Vice President J.D. Vance has ended up singeing no one but himself.
At a moment when the nation is staring down a government shutdown — a crisis Republicans argue falls squarely on the shoulders of Democrats, particularly Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer — Jeffries decided on Wednesday to borrow a tactic from Donald Trump’s playbook: ridicule your opponents through memes. But instead of rallying support, the gambit only fueled mockery of Jeffries.
The exchange began Monday when the Trump White House lobbed the first shot online. The team released an AI-generated video featuring Schumer supposedly telling the truth about Democrats — a dead giveaway of the clip’s satirical nature — while Jeffries appeared alongside him, digitally altered with a cartoonish mustache and an oversized sombrero. The imagery was clearly intended to underscore Republicans’ criticism of Democrats’ permissive stance toward illegal immigration.
Jeffries bristled at the portrayal and attempted to fire back midweek. Posting on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, the Speaker shared a clip of Vice President Vance at a press conference. But Jeffries spliced it with a meme intended to lampoon Vance: bald-headed, puff-cheeked, and staring into the camera in a bizarre deadpan. In Jeffries’ version, however, the doctored image took a different turn, depicting Vance with a wild, unruly mane of hair.
The video was clearly meant to score a point. Instead, it underscored Jeffries’ miscalculation. Rather than elevating his case, the maneuver drew a wave of derision online, leaving the Speaker as the butt of the joke in a meme war he was never equipped to win.
The problem for Jeffries, however, is that memes like these don’t seem to rattle Vice President JD Vance. As the website Know Your Meme points out, the Vance meme has circulated online for quite some time. Rather than provoking outrage, it appears to have had the opposite effect.
In fact, back in March, Blaze reporter Julio Rosas observed on X that “VP Vance has seen many of the memes and edits of his pictures and thinks it’s a funny trend.”
And as the wave of social media reaction made clear, that kind of embrace changes everything.
“I love that you think this is some kind of gotcha,” one user quipped in response to Jeffries.
Amid a government shutdown pinned squarely on their own leadership, Democrats find themselves trapped in a public relations battle they are ill-equipped to win. And if self-inflicted wounds are any measure, they are making the fight even harder.
Yet, despite the mounting damage, they show no signs of stopping.
