Donald Trump’s Thanksgiving meltdown didn’t just expose his own spiraling ego — it dragged his loyal sidekick JD Vance back into the harshest spotlight of his career.
While Trump sulked in Florida, too bitter to even post a simple “Happy Thanksgiving,” the internet was busy replaying clip after clip of Jimmy Kimmel absolutely dismantling Vance’s persona on national television. Not with policy. Not with opposition research.
With something far more devastating: ridicule.
JD Vance’s nightmare truly began in October 2024, when Jimmy Kimmel brought out Haley Joel Osment to play him in a parody political ad. It wasn’t just funny. It was surgical. Osment — complete with beard and heavy, smudged eyeliner — reenacted Vance’s now-infamous doughnut shop visit in Georgia, a real-life moment that already had people wondering if Vance had ever met a normal human being before.
In the original footage, Vance walked into the shop like an NPC dropped into the wrong video game. He awkwardly asked the cashier how long they’d worked there, then responded with a flat, robotic “Good,” no matter the answer. When asked what doughnuts he wanted, he replied, “Whatever makes sense” — easily one of the most unnatural responses ever spoken in a bakery.
Kimmel’s version took that raw awkwardness and cranked it to 11. Osment’s Vance barges into the shop, cuts in front of an elderly woman, smashes through the glass display, interrogates a Black construction worker with “How long you been Black?”, dunks a doughnut in the worker’s coffee, asks a pregnant woman “When do you spawn?”, and tells a child, “You must be the father.” The sketch ends with him giving graphic advice on how to have sex with a couch — a joke ripped from the viral (but false) rumor that Vance wrote about such an encounter in Hillbilly Elegy.
It was absurd. It was over the top.
And it landed because the core truth was already there:
JD Vance does come off as creepy, stiff, and profoundly weird.
Kimmel captured it in one brutal line:
“J.D. Vance hasn’t been under a microscope like this since his wife asked him why the couch was so sticky.”
The couch rumor never needed to be real to work as a symbol. It simply became shorthand for everything off-putting about Vance — the try-hard macho posturing, the fake authenticity, the deep personal cringe you can’t quite unsee.
Then came the eyeliner.
Starting in mid-2024, viewers noticed Vance’s eyes looked unusually dark and defined. Social media exploded with speculation that he was wearing eyeliner. Beauty experts weighed in. Makeup artists chimed in. Even George Santos tried to defend him. Vance’s wife Usha eventually put out a statement saying his lashes were natural. But the damage was done.
Every time Osment appeared as Vance on Kimmel, the eyeliner was emphasized, smeared, and exaggerated. It became visual shorthand for vanity and pretense — “Vice President Maybelline.”
Kimmel didn’t just mock Vance’s look. He punctured his entire “real America” persona. This was the guy who branded himself as a working-class Appalachian truth-teller, then went to Yale, took Silicon Valley money, moved into elite circles, and somehow still can’t order a doughnut without looking like an alien trying to imitate normal human behavior.
And when Vance finally tried to push back?
He made it worse.
When Governor Tim Walz called Trump and Vance “weird,” it stuck instantly. The GOP could not shake it. Vance tried to flip it by whining about Walz supposedly giving his wife a “firm handshake” instead of a hug. Kimmel responded by inviting Walz on the show and playing a montage of Trump ranting about how “not weird” he is.
Walz delivered the kill shot:
“If you have to tell people numerous times you’re not weird, you might be weird.”
At the same time, the Trump-Vance camp was trying to muzzle Kimmel directly. When FCC chair Brendan Carr threatened ABC’s licenses over Kimmel’s criticism, Kimmel’s show vanished from more than 40 markets for five days. Vance then had the audacity to claim Carr’s threats were “just a joke” and insist, with a straight face, that nothing really happened — even as viewers across the country saw Jimmy Kimmel Live pulled from their screens.
Kimmel answered on air:
“My ratings aren’t very good? Last time I checked, your ratings are somewhere between a hair in your salad and chlamydia. In three and a half years, I’m not the one who’s going to be doing mascara tutorials on YouTube.”
Meanwhile, Trump spiraled — calling a female reporter “stupid,” labeling another “ugly inside and out,” and snapping “Quiet, Piggy” at a Bloomberg journalist. While Trump fumed and lashed out, Vance was forced to stand behind him, defending the indefensible, pretending all of this was normal.
By the time Kimmel was done, JD Vance was no longer just a vice presidential candidate.
He was a meme.
Awkward. Over-groomed. Weirdly brittle. A man who wants to represent “real America,” but can’t convincingly interact with a cashier, hug his wife naturally on stage, or survive a week of late-night jokes without collapsing into defensive gaslighting.
That’s the power of comedy: it doesn’t just mock. It reveals.
And under Jimmy Kimmel’s spotlight, JD Vance was revealed as exactly what America suspected:
Not authentic. Not relatable.
Just… weird.
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