Vice President JD Vance has waded into the controversy surrounding actress Sydney Sweeney’s latest campaign for American Eagle, criticizing what he calls a “Democratic meltdown” over the ad’s allegedly coded messaging.
Speaking on Friday’s episode of the conservative “Ruthless” podcast, Vance delivered an incendiary rebuke of critics who have accused the campaign of playing into white supremacist aesthetics.
“My political advice to the Democrats is: continue to tell everybody who thinks Sydney Sweeney is attractive that they’re a Nazi. That appears to be their actual strategy,” Vance said. “You have a normal all-American beautiful girl doing a normal jeans ad—and they’ve managed to unhinge themselves over it.”
Vance’s comments come amid a swirl of online discourse over a series of American Eagle ads featuring Euphoria star Sweeney. The campaign, which launched last week, features playful wordplay on “genes” and “jeans.” In one ad, Sweeney tells viewers, “Genes are passed down from parents to offspring,” before smiling and clarifying, “My jeans are blue.” Another features a billboard proclaiming “Sydney Sweeney has great genes,” with “genes” humorously scratched out and replaced with “jeans.”
What was intended as a lighthearted back-to-school campaign has instead exploded into a full-blown ideological clash, with critics accusing the brand of peddling a eugenicist subtext and idealizing whiteness. One now-viral MSNBC opinion piece, titled “Sydney Sweeney’s ad shows an unbridled cultural shift toward whiteness,” argued that the ad centers Sweeney’s Anglo-Saxon features as a beauty standard in a way that subtly reinforces racial hierarchies.
No Democratic Officials Have Actually Commented
Despite the online furor, CNN White House producer Alejandra Jaramillo clarified in a report Thursday morning that “no prominent Democratic Party leaders or officials have commented on the ad.” The backlash, she notes, appears to be coming primarily from progressive commentators on social media and in opinion columns, not from the Democratic establishment.
Still, that didn’t stop Vance from seizing the moment to score political points.
“So much of the Democrats’ identity is oriented around hostility to basic American life,” Vance continued. “You have a pretty girl doing a jeans ad and they can’t help but freak out. It reveals a lot more about them than it does us.”
The vice president, who has leaned heavily into culture war issues since taking office alongside President Donald Trump in January, framed the ad uproar as emblematic of a broader “liberal obsession with policing beauty and tradition.”
“I actually thought one of the lessons [Democrats] might take from the November 2024 election was, ‘We’re going to be less crazy,’” Vance said. “But no—the lesson they’ve apparently taken is, ‘We’re going to attack people as Nazis for thinking Sydney Sweeney is beautiful.’ Great strategy, guys.”
White House Spokesman Weighs In
Earlier this week, White House spokesman Steve Cheung also slammed the backlash to the Sweeney ads, calling it “cancel culture run amok.”
“This warped, moronic and dense liberal thinking is a big reason why Americans voted the way they did in 2024,” Cheung posted on X. “They’re tired of this bullshit.”
His post included a screenshot of the controversial MSNBC headline and ignited further conservative support for the actress and the brand.
