Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance has joined TikTok – and bizarrely used his first video to promote a hard seltzer.
Joined by Nelk, a group of YouTubers known for their prank videos and vlogs, the video shows Vance accepting a box of Happy Dad Hard Seltzer.
“I appreciate it dude, we’ll use it on the airplane,” Vance says in the video, posted on Thursday.
Donald Trump’s running mate captioned the post: “Launching my TikTok with @NELKBOYS.”
TikTok users gave mixed reactions to his first outing on the social media platform, coming two months after the former president also created an account.
While some celebrated it, others mocked Vance for the awkward video.
dismissed it with what ultimate buzz word for this year’s presidential election campaigns to slate him.
“Welcome weirdo”, commented one user – referring to the big buzzword of this election season.
Another TikTok user said that Vance has “zero fizz” while some went as far as to call him a “spineless jellyfish” who “folds over his principles in the pursuit of power.”
Over on X, one person commented: “JD Vance’s first TikTok and he has all the charisma of Ron DeSantis at a state fair.”
Vance’s decision to join the platform comes despite him having previously advocated for TikTok to be banned in the US.
“We ought to do something about TikTok, but I think we also ought to do something about Google,” he said in March this year, reported The Huffington Post.
The House passed a bill in April forcing Chinese owner ByteDance to sell the viral social media platform within a year in order to avoid a nationwide ban.
Both Democratic and Republican lawmakers argued that the app poses a national security risk due to its alleged ties to the Chinese government.
Vance’s apparent U-turn mirrors that of his running mate Trump, who joined TikTok in June – four years after he tried in 2020 to get the app banned during his administration.
Since then, Trump has posted seven videos and amassed 9.4 million followers on the platform.
Vance, meanwhile, has managed to carve out nearly 50,000 followers in a day, with his first video having 78,600 likes as of early Friday morning.
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The Republican duo have been facing a hailstorm of backlash over the past week, sparked when a video resurfaced showing Vance calling Vice President Kamala Harris and other Democrats “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives,” during a 2021 interview.
The comments have been widely-condemned with Friends star Jennifer Aniston, who has been very open about her own struggles with fertility, slamming the vice presidential candidate.
“Mr Vance, I pray that your daughter is fortunate enough to bear children of her own one day. I hope she will not need to turn to IVF as a second option,” she wrote on Instagram.
Trump and Vance had to go on the defense a second time when Trump questioned Harris’ racial heritage.
In a stunning interview on stage at the National Assembly of Black Journalists convention on Wednesday, the 78-year-old declared that he “didn’t know she was Black until a number of years ago when she happened to turn Black and now she wants to be known as Black,” prompting gasps from the crowd. “So, I don’t know, is she Indian or is she Black?” he added.
Vance has since jumped to his defense, trying to dismiss the reaction to Trump’s comments as “hysterical.”
