The long, strange saga of viral memes distorting the appearance of J.D. Vance continues — and this time, it’s literally taking off.
That’s because New York-based tech innovator James Steinberg, whose many fanciful projects include a detective agency for mundane mysteries and a crowdsourced New York City map of “public cats” available for petting, has designed an app that allows you to change the background your digital airplane boarding pass to display a now-infamous image of the vice president as a bald, bearded baby-man. And if you’re wondering: yes, he’s tried it without getting arrested.
“I checked with the TSA subreddit first to see what issues I might encounter,” Steinberg tells Rolling Stone. “Some thought it was stupid, some funny, a few asked how to make custom passes like that, but nobody said I would get on the flight ban list, so it seemed okay.” Last week, he went for it, posting a photo from JFK International Airport with the caption “can’t wait to use my big beautiful bald boarding pass to travel today.”
He says there was no issue at security. “The TSA tried not to show emotion but looked mildly amused,” Steinberg says. “Maybe I should try in a less liberal airport.” While it is illegal to tamper with U.S. boarding passes, the enforcement of this law is more about security risks that could arise from changing personal information or altering a QR code, neither of which Steinberg’s app alters. There are also hundreds of U.S. airports where the TSA only needs to see your ID and won’t ask for your boarding pass. Still, Steinberg says, “Use at your own risk!”
Steinberg’s gag was inspired by the story of a less fortunate traveler. Last month, Mads Mikkelsen, a 21-year-old Norwegian tourist (not the Danish actor) told his hometown newspaper that when he flew into Newark Liberty International Airport for an extended vacation in the U.S., he was detained by border control for hours and forced to unlock his phone, on which agents found the bald Vance meme in question. Mikkelsen’s entry into the country was denied, and he believed it was due to sensitivities over the doctored likeness of the veep. Customs and Border Patrol later denied this, claiming that Mikkelsen’s “admitted drug use” — he had previously partaken of legal recreational cannabis — was the reason for his ejection.
Either way, the meme got a lot more traction, raising questions about freedom of political speech. An Irish politician even waved around a printout of the bald Vance meme in parliament while warning of American censorship and repression. “In my opinion, it leads to a discussion at the heart of the issue,” Steinberg says of his app. “For everyone else, I guess they can just enjoy making fun of J.D. Vance.”
The project has the approval of Dave McNamee, the creative consultant and humorist in Los Angeles who kicked off the Vance edits craze back in October of 2024. After Rep. Michael Collins of Georgia was mocked for posting a portrait of Vance that had been digitally manipulated to give him a more chiseled, “Chad”-like look, McNamee went in the opposite direction.
“For every 100 likes I will turn J.D. Vance into a progressively apple cheeked baby,” he wrote on X, posting the same portrait but giving Vance a more bloated face. The post eventually racked up more than 200,000 likes and 16 million views, per X metrics, and McNamee indeed continued to make Vance’s head wider and redder in the sequence of posts that followed.
“I was very weird and funny to see it take off,” McNamee says. About two weeks after his viral thread, another X user debuted the bald version of Vance using an image of the vice presidential nominee during his debate with Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz. But it was only months later, following a contentious White House meeting in February where Vance berated Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, that “it came back bigger than ever,” McNamee explains, with people altering a photo of the Vance in the Oval Office to give him chubby cheeks.
“That’s when it became a cryptocurrency and was everywhere,” McNamee says. Another one of the edits he made, of Vance with a propeller hat and a massive lollipop, became the basis of that meme coin, PWEASE. (Many of the Vance jokes also involved exaggerated baby-talk.) “People made millions,” McNamee claims, while he netted around $10,000 from the minting of his content for the blockchain. Though it as since fallen back to earth, at one point, PWEASE had a market cap of approximately $60 million, having shot up more than 92,000 percent in value since its creation.
It was around then that Vance told a reporter that he had seen the memes and found them amusing. That response — which some read as less than genuine — “only felt natural because once it became a crypto thing I knew it was in the right-wing internet zeitgeist,” McNamee says. As for the continued expansion of of the Vanciverse, he feels that people should see these memes “every day until no one knows what J.D. Vance looks like.” Of Mikkelsen’s trouble with border security, he adds, “the possible suppression of rights because you have a meme is fucked,” and that Steinberg’s form of quiet protest “is funny.”
Steinberg tells Rolling Stone that his app has already been used to create more than 300 digital plane boarding passes. And while it’s not clear how many were actually used, he expects to hear from some of those brave enough to go big, beautiful and bald for their next flight. “A person reached out and said [he is] going to try and film his journey,” he says. “Not clear how allowed that is.”
Filming in the TSA line definitely isn’t permitted, it’s important to note, but it’s perfectly understandable that people are excited to show off this iconic work of art. Stay safe out there, and may that goofy meme take you wherever you want to go.
