Vance downplays group chat messages: ‘Kids do stupid things, especially young boys.’
Irie Sentner
Wed, October 15, 2025
Evan Vucci/AP
Vice President JD Vance on Wednesday downplayed bigoted messages in Young Republicans’ group chats, suggesting they were nothing more than “edgy, offensive jokes.”
The comments came in response to POLITICO’s exclusive reporting that a trove of Telegram messages between Young Republicans — including state group leaders and at least one Trump administration staffer — was rife with racist, antisemitic and homophobic content, including jokes about gas chambers, slavery and rape.
That report was met with widespread condemnation and a cascade of firings.
The vice president suggested the real problem is the idea that an offensive joke can ruin a young person’s life.
“The reality is that kids do stupid things, especially young boys,” Vance said on "The Charlie Kirk Show." “They tell edgy, offensive jokes. That's what kids do. And I really don't want us to grow up in a country where a kid telling a stupid joke — telling a very offensive, stupid joke — is cause to ruin their lives.”
Vance’s comments Wednesday followed a late Tuesday social media post in which he slammed the Virginia attorney general candidate Jay Jones, a Democrat, for advocating for political violence, calling it “far worse than anything said in a college group chat.”
“I refuse to join the pearl clutching when powerful people call for political violence,” Vance wrote in the X post, which was reposted by several White House allies and official White House accounts.
On Wednesday, the vice president dug in, calling Jones’ messages — which discussed the hypothetical killing of Virginia’s Republican then-House speaker and his children — “one thousand times worse than what a bunch of young people, a bunch of kids, say in a group chat, however offensive it might be.”
The messages, more than 2,900 pages of which were reviewed by POLITICO, included more than 250 slurs, an instance in which rape was called “epic,” and one person saying “I love Hitler.”
A White House spokesperson referred POLITICO to spokesperson Liz Huston’s previous comments, in which she rejected the idea that Trump’s rhetoric had anything to do with the chat members’ language. “No one has been subjected to more vicious rhetoric and violence than President Trump and his supporters,” that statement said.
A spokesperson for the vice president referred POLITICO to his comments on "The Charlie Kirk Show."
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