Why is JD Vance's big baby face all over the internet?

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.

This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed.

It'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.

This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed.

This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed.

This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed.

This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed.

This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed.

This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed.

This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed.

Perhaps 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."

This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed.

You 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.