Douglas MacKinnon is a former White House and Pentagon official
A friend once told me I was the “urban version of JD Vance.” He meant that because I grew up poor in and around inner cities – homeless at times as a child – I could relate to the rural poverty and dysfunction the vice president navigated growing up.
Maybe. But since first reading Vance’s memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy,” I’ve come to believe he has never forgotten where he came from, or the daily struggles of working-class America, or the sacrifices that class has always made in defense of this country.
For me, that trait has been on full display in a "controversial" remark Vance recently made. It started when Turning Point USA's Andrew Kolvet posted on X that a TPUSA student told him "a
burrito shouldn't cost $20."
Washington Post columnist Marc Thiessen replied: "Cry me a river. The burritos in the college cafeteria are included in your meal plan." Vance shot back: "I'm surprised to hear Mark say this. If you've ever met him in person, it's quite obvious the man has never missed a burrito."
Was Vice President Vance fat-shaming a columnist?
Cue the outrage as some called it vice presidential "fat-shaming." I'm not convinced.
Thiessen, who counts himself a conservative, seems an unlikely candidate for taking genuine offense at a jab like that. And Vance has poked fun at his own weight before, joking after losing 30 pounds that "in three months, maybe I'll be a lot fatter."
No. This was Vance reading the room inhabited by working-class and young Americans, and cracking a joke he knew would draw attention to not one critical issue, but two.
To make his points, Vance leans on a tool no previous vice president has used: social media, and X in particular.
As NBC News reported in March 2025: "JD Vance grew up with chat rooms and email and instant messaging. He graduated into young adulthood at the dawn of blogging. He entered politics with a millennial's fluency in social media."
About the same time, Yair Rosenberg wrote in The Atlantic that Vance has turned social media into a "21st-century bully pulpit" to outmaneuver both his conservative rivals and his liberal critics.
Republicans I've spoken with believe that the vice president has taken to heart the legal maxim "never ask a question you don't know the answer to." He posts with purpose.
In the NBC News piece, Vance said: "I tend to err on the side of openness. That's probably a generational thing, right? I come from a very tech-forward generation."
If you're that tech-forward, with a sharp, cutting edge and a method to the madness, X becomes an incredibly powerful megaphone – a way to cultivate allies while calling out adversaries.
Vance's X retort may have been a case of two birds, one stone
Is Thiessen an "adversary" of Vance's? Days before the burrito joke, Thiessen wrote in a Post column that the vice president was undermining President Donald Trump on Iran.
Some might argue, then, that Vance was going after two targets with one joke: affordability and war.
A note to Republicans and the MAGA base: You can fully support Trump while admitting that both affordability and the Iran war are disasters. On affordability, I know plenty of paycheck-to-paycheck voters, and every one of them tells me their paycheck buys less each month. I also know Gen Z Americans who believe not only that the American dream is dead for them, but also that artificial intelligence and robotics are sending their career prospects, and their lives, off a cliff.
Elite, entrenched pundits speaking down to hurting Americans and young people from their ivory towers is not going unnoticed. Not by Democrats looking to pounce, and not, it seems, by a vice president looking to speak in defense of the suffering.
National elections are won or lost on slivers of 1% of the vote in certain districts, counties and states. Many Republicans I know believe that the GOP is losing those slivers because the party is on the wrong side of the affordability, accountability, immigration and war issues.
Shifting to Iran: There have been signs that Vance has been hesitant about, or fully opposed to, the war from day one. Thiessen, by contrast, has come across to some as one of the war's loudest cheerleaders.
The columnist has criticized the vice president over Iran. But Vance, who served in the Marine Corps and deployed to Iraq, knows well what Trump's repeated vow to "finish the job" in Iran could actually mean: U.S. ground forces.
I don't believe that Vance has ever forgotten where he came from. He seems continually aware of two paramount truths: Affordability hits the working class and the disenfranchised hardest, and when young Americans are called into combat to "finish the job," it's overwhelmingly working- and middle-class men and women who fight and die on faraway battlefields – while wealthy, elite neocons carry on in their bubbles of luxury, high above the masses.
If a joke on X brings much needed attention to those quality-of-life (and taking-of-life) issues, more power to Vance. Many in the forgotten working and young American class will no doubt appreciate it.
Douglas MacKinnon is a former White House and Pentagon official and author of the book “The 56: Liberty Lessons From Those Who Risked All to Sign The Declaration of Independence.”
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: JD Vance's $20 burrito clapback showed his Ohio roots | Opinion
