Vice President JD Vance is going through a rough stretch this month. The more he steps onto a podium in front of an audience — whether it’s beside his wife, flanked by allies, or in a venue that ought to feel like safe ground — the more the crowd energy seems to slip away from him.
And the disparity with the kind of response President Donald Trump routinely elicits is hard to ignore. So this time around, Vance reached for a well-worn Trump tactic, firing off an insult aimed at a perceived foe to rally a friendly audience, and even then, the move fell flat.
Vance spoke at the first meeting of Trump’s Board of Peace in Washington on Thursday, Feb. 19, opening with a line that should have been an easy sell.
He began by lavishing praise on Trump.
“Thank you, Mr. President, for your leadership but also for the kind words about me personally,” the sycophantic Vance began.
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“I knew exactly what I wanted to say, but after the President said that I was so smart,” Vance continued gushingly, patting himself on the back, “and I didn’t want to repeat our congresswoman who froze for 20 seconds over in Munich.”
Turning to Trump and lifting his hands for added punch, a simpering Vance thought he was delivering a joke, smiling at Trump as he said, “Now I’m tempted, sir, just to freeze for 20 seconds, and just stare at the cameras and maybe they’ll say nice things about me like they do about congresswoman Cortez.”
Vance’s quip about congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez before a friendly crowd landed with a deafening silence, not a snicker, not a giggle and certainly no laughter. Critics argued that if you can’t make your friends laugh, you’re in trouble.
Vance, sensing his attempt at humor completely missed the mark, quickly tried to move on, but the internet wasn’t buying it, and neither was the progressive lawmaker from New York.
Ocasio-Cortez flipped the script by delivering a blistering comeback that ran over a clip of Vance’s flopped moment.
“The only thing longer than my pause to think was their silence to his joke,” she wrote in a scathing post on X.
A Democratic candidate for Congress in Missouri’s 2nd District, Fred Wellman, also blasted Vance over a clip of the attempted joke.
“This whiny victim will never shut up and he will never be President.”
X user MR. M agreed, “The harder he tries to be funny, the worse it gets. A charisma void.”
And another response about Vance lamenting the prospect of better media coverage read, “I think his visit to the Winter Olympics proved that won’t happen.”
Several clips of the 36-year-old Ocasio-Cortez’s remarks at the Munich Security Conference have gone viral in mostly conservative circles amid speculation about a potential 2028 presidential run.
And she told The New York Times that her message warning wealthy world leaders about the risk that worker discontent could pave the way for authoritarianism was getting lost in the noise, which was frustrating to her.
Her trip to Germany stands as one of her most high-profile international excursions, receiving broad European acclaim, though a few missteps along the way have stirred up conservatives.
She was asked whether the United States should deploy troops if China attacked Taiwan, a close ally, and she paused before stumbling through an answer. She also claimed that Venezuela lies below the equator. It does not. It sits in the Northern Hemisphere.
