President Donald Trump may have tasked his second-in-command JD Vance with selling the rebrand of the GOP’s tax law, but what the vice president is really concerned with is gratitude.
More specifically, he’s fixated on people who he believes are insufficiently grateful for what the United States has provided for them.
Take, for instance, former Vice President Kamala Harris. She wasn’t fit to lead the country, Vance said on the campaign trail, because she wasn’t “grateful for it.”
Vance famously clashed with Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the Oval Office in February over the Ukrainian leader’s failure to grovel to Trump for all the aid the U.S. had provided Zelenskyy’s country during its ongoing war against Russia.
“Have you ever said ‘thank you’ once?” the VP said.
Months later, the vice president complained to Fox News host Will Cain that the Democratic mayoral candidate for New York City, Zohran Mamdani, wasn’t sufficiently sycophantic.
“Does Mamdani, when you hear him speak, is this a man who feels gratitude for the United States of America?” Vance asked Cain. “Is this a man who feels grateful for all of the opportunities, the incredible bounty of this country?”
Now, Vance has found a new target for insufficient gratitude: MSNBC host (and frequent Trump administration critic) Joy Reid.
On Thursday, Vance reshared a post from the account “End Wokeness” on X, featuring a video of Reid and progressive writer Ta-Nehisi Coates in conversation at Xavier College last year. In the clip, Reid spoke about how her immigrant mother came to realize that life in the U.S. would be more challenging than she initially expected.
“When my mother came from Guyana she realized it is not a land of opportunity for people like us,” she said during the talk.
In his retweet, Vance again shouted about ingratitude.
“Joy Reid has had such a good life in this country,” he wrote, “It’s been overwhelmingly kind and gracious to her. She is far wealthier than most. Yet she oozes with contempt.”
“My honest, non-trolling advice to Joy Reid is that you’d be a much happier person if you showed a little gratitude,” he concluded.
When Vance labels someone an ingrate, it’s almost always a person of color: Harris and Reid are Black women. (Asian and Black in Harris’ case.) Mamdani, a rising star in the Democratic Party, was born and raised in Kampala, Uganda, before moving to New York City with his family at the age of 7. The exception is Zelenskyy, though the Ukrainian leader is, of course, a foreigner.
The racial implications of Vance’s language aren’t lost on Efrén Pérez, a professor of political science and psychology at UCLA.
Though Vance is far less overt than Trump ― the latter has a bad, bigoted habit of calling women of color like Harris and Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas) “low IQ” ― race still factors in, Pérez said.
“I doubt that the vice president knows about the science behind this, but his singling out of POC, including foreigners, aligns neatly with a prejudiced explanation,” the professor told HuffPost. “These are flat-out racist actions and comments directed at very specific people because by highlighting them, he taps into some people’s prejudiced thinking.”
The stereotype of the “ungrateful” or “always complaining” person of color is obviously harmful. In politics, it’s used to delegitimize the struggles and valid criticisms of marginalized communities.
“It’s consistent with a highly moralistic view of non-white others in this country as ’undeserving,” Pérez said.
Vance’s grievances tap into a greater anxiety among some white Americans, too, Pérez said: that they’re being replaced by minorities.
Up until around 2000, the average white person in the U.S. was fairly comfortable in their position as the demographic majority. They wielded most of the political power.
But there’s been a noticeable increase in people of color ― Blacks, Latinos, Asian-Americans and others ― reaching nearly 40% of the U.S. population. For some white Americans, anxieties about the country’s demographic shift toward a majority-minority population became more pronounced during Barack Obama’s presidency.
“For many whites, it felt like they were losing ‘their country,’ which is another way of saying, ‘Me and my group are no longer at the top of the racial pecking order in the U.S,’” Pérez said. “This explains the types of white backlash that facilitated Donald Trump’s rise in 2016 and 2024.”
Now that Trump is in office a second time, Vance and his followers feel seasoned and emboldened to fight politically for what they believe in, including the belief that America’s minority groups have a victim complex and need to be more grateful. (It’s ironic that they do so while relying heavily on white grievance, aimed at mobilizing white voters who now perceive themselves to be “last place” in the racial status hierarchy.)
The fact that Vance rarely, if ever, has directed such “you’re not grateful enough” criticism to white Americans is very telling, Pérez said.
There’s some American exceptionalism at play here, too, said Todd Belt, professor and political management program director at the Graduate School of Political Management at George Washington University.
There’s a strand of foreign policy conservatism that has long been associated with the idea that the United States is exceptional and beyond reproach. In their eyes, the U.S. is the world’s peacekeeper, and others have for too long taken advantage of that, Belt said.
“According to this line of thought, the U.S. spends so much more money than any other nation on defense and foreign aid, and others are freeloading off the U.S.’s generosity,”″ Belt said.
That makes sense when leveled at Zelenskyy, but the fact that Vance is using it domestically ― directing the criticism toward fellow Americans ― is something new. Although subtle, Vance’s repeated use of the trope can be viewed as another way of othering non-white Americans.
Given all that immigrants have done for this country, maybe it’s Vance who needs to extend a “thank you,” said Shaun Harper, a professor of public policy, business and education at the University of Southern California.
“Our country does far too little to express its gratitude to the descendants of enslaved Africans and to immigrants whose labor made America an economic superpower,” Harper said. “The nation is deeply indebted to these people, but the Trump Administration seems to believe it is the other way around.”