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J.D. Vance and Marco Rubio hilariously turn the tables on media hit piece blitz

December 19, 2025 | | Print Article

Vice President JD Vance trolled Secretary of State Marco Rubio and the mainstream press with a hilarious tweet published on Wednesday.

To understand his funny tweet, you must first understand the backstory, which begins with Vanity Fair magazine publishing an extensive hit piece on the Trump administration earlier this week.

The hit piece was possible because the administration made the mistake of voluntarily signing up to not only be profiled by the leftist magazine, but also have their pictures taken as well.

After the hit piece was published, The New York Times published its own smaller hit piece alleging that there had been “tension” between Vance and Rubio during the Vanity Fair photo shoot:

The silly Times based this false reporting on a joke — a literal joke — that Vance had made during the photoshoot.

“I’ll give you $100 for every person you make look really sh-tty compared to me,” Vance had reportedly told the photographer. “And $1,000 if it’s Marco.”

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The photographer must have also taken the joke seriously, because Rubio wound up looking like a complete fool in Vanity Fair’s photo:

Now fast-forward to Wednesday, when Rubio, who himself has always demonstrated a great sense of humor, made Vanity Fair’s ridiculous photo of him his X profile picture.

Look:

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Responding to Rubio’s tweet, Vance dropped yet another joke.

“I guess I owe that guy $1,000,” he wrote.

Look:

Boom!

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But this fun and humor comes after what was not a fun start. As previously reported, for Vanity Fair’s profile of the Trump administration, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt was also photographed. And as with Rubio, her picture was a hot mess.

Look:

The photo prompted an immediate clapback from the White House.

“It’s clear that Vanity Fair intentionally photographed Karoline and the White House staff in bizarre ways, and deliberately edited the photos, to try to demean and embarrass them,” a White House spokesperson told the Daily Mail.

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“Karoline is a beautiful person and truly one of the most incredible people you will meet in politics, and she is doing an extraordinary job serving the American people as the White House Press Secretary,” the spokesperson added.

Christopher Anderson, the photographer who took the picture, defended his work.

“Style is for others to judge,” he told Newsweek. “My objective, when photographing the political world, is to make photographs that cut through the staged-managed image to reveal something more real, and for the images to honestly portray the encounter that I had at that moment. Being very close is part of how I have been doing this for many years now.”

“Some on the internet have expressed shock that I chose not to retouch blemishes, injection marks, wrinkles, etc. From my perspective, it should be shocking if I did indeed retouch these things out,” he added.

“Very close-up portraiture has been a fixture in a lot of my work over the years,” Anderson likewise told The Independent. “Particularly, political portraits that I’ve done over the years. I like the idea of penetrating the theater of politics.”

“I know there’s a lot to be made with, ‘Oh, he intentionally is trying to make people look bad,’ and that kind of thing – that’s not the case. If you look at my photograph work, I’ve done a lot of close-ups in the same style with people of all political stripes,” he added.

Vanity Fair’s profile of the Trump administration also provoked anger because of its out-of-context quotes, especially from White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles.

Vivek Saxena
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