JD Vance Channels Trump's Awkward Energy In Cringe On-Stage Moment

President Donald Trump may have won over his voters with his charisma and America-first agenda. Be that as it may, Trump isn't perfect, and as much as his supporters would hate to admit it, he's had his fair share of awkward moments to match the attributes that earned their votes. It seems some of his inelegance rubbed off on Vice President JD Vance, whose life was much different before he assumed office.

On June 3, 2025, the vice president took the stage alongside Oren Cass, the founder of the American Compass think tank, for the American Compass Fifth Anniversary Gala. Their discussion was streamed via the official White House YouTube channel the same day. After their talk was said and done, a C-SPAN clip with a closer view posted on X showed Vance briefly didn't know how to leave the stage, before doing a double take, earnestly waving, and finally exiting upstage center. Though his directionally-challenged moment, and perhaps others to come, may not have been as obnoxious as the other Trump-like qualities Vance has seemingly developed, his movement was strikingly similar to the president, who often struggles to smoothly navigate stages and other venues and exit them in a timely manner without having to be redirected. 

There have been signs that Trump's age is catching up him, and some social media commentators jokingly suggested that the vice president's awkward onstage moment could mean the same, even if he was only 40 years old at the time he attended the gala. 

"Sad!" one X user quipped after watching the cringeworthy clip of Vice President JD Vance. "Vance is already in some type of early cognitive decline." Others humorously suggested he could have been searching for his running mate, President Donald Trump — who's apparently stopped pretending to care about him. "[Is he] distracted by Trump's whereabouts?" another X user asked. Regardless of why he struggled leaving the stage, it's clear the vice president may have inherited one of Trump's less desirable traits sometime during their almost six months in office.

As much as Trump would like the American public to believe he isn't aging, though no amount of buzzworthy makeup fails or possibly fudged medical reports will convince us to believe his ruse, he's also shown his age via his blatant forgetfulness. His tendency to get lost onstage without help, for example, was displayed in an X clip that exposed him cluelessly strutting off in the wrong direction during the 2018 G20 summit. Another X post seemed to show him aimlessly wandering off on the sidelines while some staffers rushed to redirect him during the 2025 Super Bowl.

Trump also neglected to put his John Hancock on executive orders before leaving a ceremony dedicated to their signing in a clip NBC News posted to its website on March 31, 2017. While Vance seemingly hasn't had that particular faux pas yet, his visible Trump traits hint that he could, one day, do the same.