When Senator JD Vance of Ohio joined Donald J. Trump’s ticket, his allies hoped he would help soften the image of a combative campaign and offer a polished, populist storyteller to suburban voters. Instead, in recent weeks, Mr. Vance has found himself defined as much by a late-night comedy bit as by any policy speech — this time not by clip edits on social media, but by a high-profile tag-team roast from Stephen Colbert and former President Barack Obama.
On a recent special episode of The Late Show, Mr. Colbert devoted an extended segment to Mr. Vance and Mr. Trump, weaving real footage, archival quotes and exaggerated sketches into what amounted to a sustained character study. Mr. Obama joined by pre-taped segment and on stage, trading lines with the host in a carefully choreographed routine that cast Mr. Trump as erratic and self-absorbed and Mr. Vance as his eager but uncomfortable hype man.
The premise was simple: Mr. Colbert played the exasperated observer, treating the Trump–Vance ticket as a kind of runaway reality show; Mr. Obama supplied the calm, almost professorial counterpoint, annotating the same behavior with notes about norms, institutions and the stakes of presidential power. The target, however, was often Mr. Vance.
Mr. Colbert’s writers returned repeatedly to what has already become familiar material in liberal media: Mr. Vance’s stiff small talk in a Georgia doughnut shop; the online fixation with his dark, sharply outlined eyelashes; and a viral, unverified rumor about a passage in his memoir that became the basis for a string of “couch” jokes. In the segment, Mr. Colbert treated those elements not as substantive critique but as a kind of visual shorthand for awkwardness and overcompensation.
One sketch, played for the studio audience and later clipped online, imagined Mr. Vance as a man “who desperately wants to look important, but keeps tripping over the script of what he thinks power feels like.” Video of the real doughnut-shop visit — in which Mr. Vance asks a cashier how long she has worked there and replies “Good,” regardless of the answer, before telling staff to give him “whatever makes sense” — was juxtaposed with an over-the-top reenactment. The fictional version cuts in front of customers, asks a series of inappropriate questions and ends by dispensing unsolicited advice on personal behavior. The implication was that, in the host’s view, the line between reality and parody is uncomfortably thin.
Mr. Obama’s role was subtler but no less pointed. In one segment, he described a country in a “pretty dark place,” noting how “basic democratic rules and norms have been weakened,” and contrasting his own approach to governing with what he called the embrace of “extremist views” under Mr. Trump. While he rarely mentioned Mr. Vance by name, the senator hovered in the background of the montage as a constant presence at rallies and press conferences, nodding along as Mr. Trump disparaged reporters or cast routine setbacks as earth-shaking conspiracies.
At several points, Mr. Colbert framed Mr. Vance as an emblem of that transformation. The show revisited the senator’s earlier criticism of Mr. Trump — before his rise to national office — and his subsequent, full-throated embrace of the former president. The host likened the evolution to a “sitcom arc nobody asked for,” charting a trajectory from best-selling memoirist to “presidential hype man,” and ultimately to what he called “America’s most awkward vice-presidential meme.”
The critique extended beyond style to substance, though always couched in comedy. Mr. Colbert pointed to Mr. Vance’s defense of the Trump administration during controversies over efforts to pressure media companies and regulators, and to his role in downplaying concerns about threats to free expression when an allied federal commissioner publicly floated the idea of targeting a network’s broadcast licenses. In the Late Show framing, Mr. Vance became the designated explainer of actions viewers could see for themselves, a politician trying to insist that a plainly coercive posture was “just a joke.”
Whether that framing sticks outside the late-night audience is less clear. Mr. Vance’s supporters dismiss Mr. Colbert as part of a predictable liberal entertainment apparatus that has long mocked conservative figures and their voters. They argue that the focus on eyeliner, internet rumors and selectively edited clips trivializes legitimate policy debates and reinforces coastal caricatures of “real America” that Mr. Vance claims to represent.
But there is little question that the segment found an audience. Clips of the Colbert–Obama roast have circulated widely on social media, where short attention spans favor vivid character sketches over nuanced policy arguments. In one widely shared moment, Mr. Obama remarks that some voters remember the economy being “pretty good” when Mr. Trump took office, only to add, with a pause, that this was “because it was my economy.” The line drew a roar from the studio and quickly spawned its own round of reaction videos — with Mr. Vance visible over Mr. Trump’s shoulder in the archival footage that followed.
For Mr. Colbert, the confrontation fits squarely within a long-running project: using satire to explore, and often to puncture, the public personas of powerful figures. For Mr. Vance, it poses a more delicate problem. A vice-presidential hopeful can ignore a passing joke, but a sustained narrative — repeated night after night, reinforced with memes and catchphrases — can be harder to escape.
The senator has so far responded cautiously, criticizing what he portrays as media condescension without directly engaging every punchline. Yet as the Colbert-driven image of JD Vance — heavily made-up, a little overeager, perpetually out of step — takes deeper hold in parts of the electorate, his campaign may find that the argument over who he is is no longer being led from podiums and town halls, but from a theater on Broadway, taped before a laughing crowd.
