JD Vance Jokes About Killing Civilians as Kimmel Gets Yanked Off Air

Vice President JD Vance salutes as he exits Air Force Two after returning from Howell, Mich., at Andrews Airforce Base, Md., Wednesday, Sept. 17, 2025.Jessica Koscienlniak

The Republican party apparently thinks that making fun of people’s deaths is absolutely abhorrent, unless the people dying are your perceived political enemies.

Over the past two weeks, the Trump administration has deployed^[2] two lethal, and highly contested military strikes on boats in international waters, claiming that the passengers were members of Tren de Aragua and were carrying “big bags of cocaine and fentanyl.”

On Wednesday, Vice President JD Vance, while speaking of the attacks, appeared^[3] to make a joke about the US potentially killing civilians while speaking at a rally in Michigan.

“I was talking to Secretary Hegseth, and you know what he said? He said, you know what, Mr. Vice President? We don’t see any of these drug boats coming into our country. They’ve completely stopped,” Vance said.

He added: “And I said, I know why. I would stop, too. Hell, I wouldn’t go fishing right now in that area of the world.”

The joke sparked a flurry of criticism online, with many pointing out the blatant double standard between Vance’s comments and the GOP’s current crackdown on Charlie Kirk’s detractors in the wake of the conservative activist’s death.

Shortly after Kirk was murdered, several Republicans declared^[4] that they will use the full extent of their power to punish anyone who speaks ill of the Turning Point USA founder, whose own history^[5] of hateful rhetoric has been well-documented.

As my colleague Anna Merlan, reported^[6], several private companies including MSNBC, the Washington Post, and Fox Sports Las Vegas have terminated employees who criticized Kirk’s legacy in the wake of his death. That includes ABC’s abrupt suspension of Jimmy Kimmel Live! The decision was made hours^[7] after Brendan Carr, Trump’s head of the FCC, threatened to take action against ABC while appearing on a podcast. (Nextstar, ABC’s station owner, stated^[8] that the FCC’s comments had no impact on their decision to pull Kimmel’s show.)

This blatant double standard reveals that the GOP’s crackdown^[9] on Kirk’s detractors has nothing to do with decorum or respect for the dead, and everything to do with political retribution against their rivals.

As my colleague, Mark Follman, recently said in a interview^[10] on Reveal‘s “More To The Story:” [Trump] is “immediately casting blame on his political opponents, demonizing and turning the heat up. And that is a recipe for more violence. The very top of our political leadership is stoking a political and cultural war.”