Forget it, Libs. It’s Memetown.

Putting in my chips now: All on red ‘28! Vice President J.D. Vance is the presidential frontrunner.

Approximately fourteen-million, seven-hundred-thousand, six-hundred-and-eighty-one different incidents could happen between now and then to scotch my prognostication, including, but hardly limited to, economic depression, nuclear war, an ill-timed, awkward yelp, chowing into pizza with utensils, or even Democrats at last admitting sex pests have no right to lurk in high-school girls’ bathrooms.

A profusion of potential pivot points could render my prediction asunder. (But when has that ever stopped a pundit from gumming off, am I right?) Yet, within just two months of the second Trump Administration, Veep Vance has fully assimilated his boss’s primary feature. He’s become the currency of the age: fungible meme material.

Trump’s larger-than-life persona, subtle self-awareness, all-caps Boomer social postings, and cartoonish mien have made him, in Ross Douthat’s words, the “defining figure of the age,” as he operates fluidly in our most prominent communicative method: digital media. Just consider the many aphorisms Trump has unwittingly contributed to our lexicon: “sad!”; “many such cases”; “haters and losers”; “devasting in their percentage and power of destruction”; “grab them by the p*ssy”; “covfefe”. The Bard of 5th Avenue gives Billy Shakes a run for his money with additions to the English idiom.

Vance too is a gifted writer—but his prose necessarily reflects his Ivy-League aspirations. His mega-selling memoir Hillbilly Elegy was an elite instruction manual for his kind, a Rick Steves travelogue to a childhood racked by divorce, drug-use, familial instability, and shrouded longings. Vance is too cerebral to command mass attention like his boss. Instead, he relies on the unpaid mediators of political comms: medium-profile Twitter users.

The spit-duel between Vance and Trump and Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky over arms support inspired more than just a few dozen tut-tutting columns from Blob scribes. Vance’s irascible behavior during the exchange kicked off a meme campaign that’s left the bland cadre of cable-news opinionators flummoxed.

Writing in The Atlantic, Ali Breland explained the phenomena: “In recent days, memes have spread across social media in which the vice president’s face has been Photoshopped to give him cartoonishly chubby cheeks.” The cherubic imposition isn’t a return to form for Vance, who was noticeably chunkier and smooth-shaven during Trump’s first term. The memes present a more exaggerated figure: rounder, lumpier, more wide-eyed, a department-store Santa costume transposed over his stocky build.

The clownish depiction of Vance, which is often accompanied by gap-toothed, impudent quotes, emerged ab ovo from viral leftists. But it has since been adopted, and fully assimilated, by the right. Breland marvels at the horseshoe theory in action: “The memes are going viral on the left-wing internet. But they are equally, if not more, popular on the right.” Despite having the requisite undercarriage equipment, Breland is stumped as to why MAGA-aligned accounts are happily sharing images of a Stay-Puft Vance chugging Mountain Dew Code Red while pwning noobs in Halo, as a Teletubby, as the Marvel villain MODOK, as South Park’s Cartman, or, as my favorite, the hapless sonpecked Phil Margera.

“So why is the right willing to make fun of one of its own with memes?” Breland quizzes himself, unable to answer. He’s not alone in puzzlement. Right-wing mic jockey Jesse Kelly admits “I’m the only person in the entire country who doesn’t get the [J.D.] Vance meme stuff and why it’s funny.” Shake that lorn feeling, Jesse! Your confusion is shared by approximately one half of the human population—the distaff division.

Few members of the fairer sex are swapping Vance graphics like Pokémon cards. It may be backlash over the memoirist’s snark about “childless cat ladies,” which were, naturally, taken in stride by young women secure in their feline-infecund lifestyle. Or, more likely, it’s due to the needling nature of the memes, which can be attributed to the scientific term of art: dudes being dudes.

No amount of essays, polemics, screeds, or explainers can ever do full justice to the masculine urge to bust a man’s balls. It’s like having to explain a joke: the act of doing so renders it witless. Trying to describe why the Vance memedemic is good juvenile fun is akin to drafting a peer-reviewed study on the logic behind children playing tag. An exegesis is not needed. It just is, and they just do.

If your face muscles still fail to squinch at the sight of the vice president in a propeller beanie grasping a sucker the size of a cartel clock, I’m afraid your epistemological faculties can’t grasp the essence of guying. But don’t fret. You’ll soon see the long-term effect of a bro who can hang. Vance reportedly told a correspondent at The Blaze that he thinks the endless roll of his blown-out rictus is a “funny trend,” which means he’s ignoring the screams of so many campaign consultants in his ear range. Always an auspicious sign!

“Every time I open this app I see a brand new picture of [J.D.] Vance made to look like some sort of Cabbage Patch doll,” griped singer Dionne Warwick. Just wait for the memes of President Beauregarde taking the oath of office in four years.