On the heels of J.D. Vance’s strange behavior during the vice-presidential debate, he was skewered in a skit which even poked fun at his supposed use of eyeliner. After debuting his impression in September, Haley Joel Osment returned to “Jimmy Kimmel Live” on October 2. The first half of the sketch took jabs at Vance’s awkward encounter with employees at a donut shop in Georgia in August. Footage of the actual encounter went viral after the vice-presidential nominee struggled and stammered his way through a conversation with the employees — one of which, refused to be on camera.
Osment was relentless in his pitch-perfect impression of Vance as he fumbled over simply placing an order in the donut shop. “Donut…” the faux-Vance says in the sketch, looking expectantly at the worker. “Which donut, though?” the employee asks. “Whatever makes sense … hold the pickles,” Osment’s Vance replies. At one point, Osment’s character loses patience in the ordering process and just slams his fist through a glass donut display case. After struggling with the donut shop staff, Osment’s Vance then attempts to engage with customers, which goes horribly. Frustration mounts for him in the skit, and that is when the show mocks Vance’s suspected use of eyeliner. The results were both brutal and hilarious.
J.D. Vance’s smeared eyeliner
For the last half of the sketch, Haley Joel Osment’s J.D. Vance has smeared eyeliner on both of his eyes. “Liberals even stooped so low as to suggest that I made love to a couch!” he says to the camera after losing his composure with the donut shop’s staff and patrons. Of course, this parody of Vance’s rumored eyeliner came shortly after the vice presidential debate when multiple viewers were tweeting about the Republican nominee’s possible makeup use. “JD Vance is so slick, yet his eyeliner stays perfectly in place. Maybe it’s Maybeline [sic],” one X (formerly Twitter) user wrote during the debate. However, not everyone was critical of the Ohio senator’s look, as one user said he looked “pretty.”
In fact, the discussion surrounding Vance’s eyes and suspected makeup use became so viral that disgraced former U.S. representative George Santos felt obligated to chime in. “I’ve met him in person before he was a senator and I can confirm he has long eyelashes and they cast a shadow,” Santos tweeted on October 1, while refuting the whispers that Vance used eyeliner.
A couple of months before the debate — when Eyelinergate went full-tilt — we spoke to makeup artist Luna Viola about Vance’s lashes, and they said there was evidence backing up Santos’s claim. “It is also very possible that [Vance] has very dark, perfect thick eyelashes,” Violet told NickiSwift in August, adding that those could “create an optical illusion of black eyeliner.”
