The Washington Post spent 2024 calling JD Vance soft.
Now he's on a Marine Corps obstacle course with his son – cracking jokes and not caring who's watching.
You need to watch what happens when the Left's favorite punching bag takes the field.
The Marine Who Never Left the Corps
JD Vance didn't just post a workout video for social media points.
He went back to the institution that built him.
From 2003 to 2007, a working-class kid from a struggling Rust Belt town in Ohio named James Hamel laced up Marine Corps boots and shipped out to Iraq as a combat correspondent with the 2nd Marine Aircraft Wing.
He carried an M16 outside the wire.
He wrote in Hillbilly Elegy that the Corps taught him "how to live like an adult."
That wasn't a throwaway line in a memoir.
That was the thesis of a man's life.
The video circulating now shows Vance – Vice President of the United States – tackling the same kind of obstacle course that turned a broke, directionless Ohio kid into a Marine corporal.
And this time, he brought his son.
The Left Called It Cosplay. Vance Called It Tuesday.
The Left mocked Vance after he trained with Navy SEALs in Coronado last December, calling it a "photo op" and "cosplay."
They mocked Pete Hegseth for working out with Marines in Malaysia.
They do not understand that a Vice President who gets on an obstacle course with his kid is showing Americans something real – that the men running this country believe in the same things they ask of the men and women in uniform.
Hegseth built the framework.
He stood before the entire joint force last fall and declared the era of fat generals over.
"Every member of the joint force at every rank is required to take a test twice a year," Hegseth announced.
He meant it – and then flew to Malaysia and did PT with the troops to prove it.
https://twitter.com/EricLDaugh/status/2089756574432596113?s=20
Vance is operating in the same spirit.
A Marine who went to Iraq in 2005 and a father raising the next generation of Americans under the same standards that forged him.
What the Left Still Cannot Grasp
Every Democrat strategist who called the Coronado SEAL training a taxpayer-funded vanity project missed the point so completely it should embarrass them.
Here's the detail that sums up the whole thing: Vance was the only person in those photos wearing a beard.
Hegseth had already banned beards across the entire military.
The Vice President showed up to train with elite special operations forces – in violation of the grooming standards his own administration set – and nobody cared, because this was never about looking the part.
This administration believes physical standards, shared sacrifice, and the kind of culture the Marine Corps builds actually matter.
Biden's Pentagon spent four years telling you the real threats were climate change and diversity quotas.
https://twitter.com/warDaniel47/status/2089668062865690808?s=20
Two-thirds of reserve troops are now overweight – a number that predates Trump and reflects a decade of eroding standards under the people who called fitness "problematic."
Standards are not punishment.
They are the mechanism by which ordinary people become extraordinary.
A kid from a struggling Rust Belt town ran three miles until he was heaving and a drill instructor got in his face and said "if you're not puking, you're lazy."
That kid grew up to be the Vice President – and he took his son to show him exactly where it started.
Sources:
- Morgan Phillips, "Exclusive Photos: JD Vance Joins Navy SEAL Training, Pushes Limits in Grueling Workout," Fox News, December 22, 2025.
- Svetlana Shkolnikova, "Vance Credits Service in Marine Corps for Teaching Him 'How to Live Like an Adult,'" Stars and Stripes, July 16, 2024.
- "Hegseth Works Out with US Troops in Malaysia as War Department Vows 'We Will Be Fit, Not Fat,'" Fox News, October 2025.
- "JD Vance's Marine Corps Service Would Set Him Apart from Most Vice Presidents," Military.com, July 16, 2024.