Millennials heard it as soon as Facebook launched in the mid-2000s: Be careful what you post online, because it will come back to haunt you. All those drunk party photos will surely ruin anybody trying to run for president one day. At least that was the theory. We’ve got our first test of that idea. And it doesn’t seem to be true in any way.
A Facebook photo that appears to show vice presidential candidate JD Vance passed out on the ground in 2007 surfaced online recently. The photo, rated as authentic by Snopes, was posted by someone else, though Vance appears to have commented on it with, “You Danielle, this might be my first official blackout, I don’t remember being asleep at all.”
The person who posted the photo replied to Vance the next day with, “Your pillow was a stuffed animal you grabbed, btw.” A third person appears to have entered the discussion underneath the photo with, “Was the fact that your belt buckle and pants were undone mentioned at all yet? Cuz that’s true also.”
And that’s it. A moment captured in time and posted to Facebook on Jan. 15, 2007, back when Vance was 22 years old. Something we were told would be ruinous for a potential candidate for higher office. But the response so far online has been shrugs. Vance was passed out on the floor just like countless other college students had been before him and will continue to be until the end of time. The Trump-Vance campaign didn’t respond to questions emailed Tuesday.
But it’s not just Facebook. Vance, who’s now 39 years old, had his personal blog from 2005 also surface online in recent days. He wrote about being “bored and lonely” while serving in the military, liking the soundtrack to the 2004 film Garden State, and about crying before deploying to Iraq, something that apparently made him feel “female.” Again, his online presence from that era has been mostly greeted with a collective shrug.
As it turns out, you can pour your heart out online, and people don’t think it’s a negative thing just because it wasn’t focus-grouped to death. Vance was a normal human being who did normal human being things. At least he was in the 2000s. Now it seems like Vance has transformed into a real weirdo, and that’s something potential voters are much more interested in as they prepare to vote in November. They want to know whether Vance is really going to help Trump become a “dictator” as the man himself has admitted to wanting to achieve on “day one.”
Despite previously calling himself a “never Trump guy” and even privately referring to Donald Trump as America’s Hitler, Vance has hitched his wagon to the extremist Republican candidate. Vance, by all accounts, isn’t a true believer in the fascism he’s promoting, but that’s really beside the point. He’s an odd guy who pushes strange ideas about the world and spreads misleading information to achieve his political goals. As just one example, Vance blamed what he believes is the dysfunction of the country on “childless cat ladies.” Trump followed up by defending the absurd talking point.
There is, of course, the couch thing. You’ve certainly heard by now that Vance supposedly had sex with a couch and wrote about it in his book Hillbilly Elegy. But that’s not true. It started as a joke on X and started to spread, with endless memes about Vance being a couch-fucker. It’s a joke, but it’s resonated with people who view the Republican Party establishment as a group of really bizarre guys who want to control the bodies of women and make sure there are genital inspections before each children’s sporting match.
There’s genuinely been a generational shift occurring over the past two weeks in national politics. Joe Biden, the oldest president the U.S. has ever had, stepped aside to allow his vice president Kamala Harris to run in November. Harris, born October 20, 1964, is technically Generation X and would be the first member of her generation to become president if she secures a win. Funnily enough, one potential VP pick for Harris, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, is just six months older than Harris and is technically a Baby Boomer because the cut-off for Gen X is mid-1964, according to Washington Post columnist Philip Bump, the author of The Aftermath: The Last Days of the Baby Boom.
The flip side of the excitement for Harris is the disgust at Vance. Generational change has seen some younger people radicalized by the extreme ideas of people like Trump. And while millennials are one of the most consistently liberal generations, there are still plenty of people in their 30s who identify with fascist ideas, even if it’s at least partially motivated by opportunism and the pursuit of power.
But it’s definitely a new ballgame. The average voter of the 1990s may have been scandalized by Bill Clinton smoking pot, so much that Clinton hilariously insisted he “didn’t inhale.” But the world has changed and the political rules along with it. Nobody cares that Vance got drunk and passed out in college. They care that he’s running to enact some of the worst policies ever floated in American politics.
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