Kyle Raymond Fitzpatrick, writing at his Substack newsletter The Trend Report, has put together a horrifying conclusion: We now know what a Millennial president looks like.

My brain has become infected with an upsetting fact that I am going to infect your brain with: the most powerful Millennial in the world — and perhaps ever — is JD Vance.

This is obvious but it has to be said as such. I realized this a few weeks ago, angry about some stupid Trump thing as I picked out clothes for the following day, thinking about how great it would be to have Millennial leaders, to have AOC or Ilhan Omar in the White House. Then, lightning struck: we already have that. Not them, no, but we have a Millennial: JD Vance. We complain and complain and long and long for younger leadership and, yet, somehow the world is living under the rule of a literal forty year old. This means we’ve entered the era of a Millennial presidency, as big theatrical speeches in Greenland suggest who is really in charge. Paired with Zuckerberg, we’re seeing what Millennial power looks like in real time as Trump himself reduces to figurehead, to mascot and plaything, instead of brain. That means Vance and his very public persona (versus the “quiet” and invisible VP of modern times) is perhaps the real president. We may be looking at our situation quite wrong, dogging on other generations for not pulling their weight when Millennials hold a smoking gun.

He went on to unpack this realization.

He’s not a “traditional” Millennial on the surface, no, in that he supports the worst ideologies on the planet. But: he’s in an interracial relationship. He’s a working class success story. He worked in — and is shaped by — tech. He had a blogging era! He had (successful) Hollywood dreams! He literally has a LinkedIn! He eats fish tacos with fried avocado! He has a fucking BEARD!!!!!!!!! He is the ultimate Millennial “Just asking questions!” older brother pig man, the outsider who isn’t actually on the outside, wielding a Libertarian chaos unique to Millennial male malaise.

That’s the Millennial context of this moment, representing an evolution of our story. This is what it looks like when an embittered Millennial runs shit like an embittered Millennial would: organized, quiet, chaotic, yet somehow “effective” in using old and new media as cudgels to dominate all conversation, to be the thing that everyone hates — which is the long running Millennial story. He has channeled that Millennial rage into an outlet he could mold, joining someone like Stephen Miller to revamp an old brand in his image: a lost Republican party. “I wasn’t as critical of my party in 2016,” he told Financial Times in 2018. “But when I look at tax reform, when I look at healthcare reform, I see Trump as the least worrisome part of the Republican party’s problem, which is that we are basically living in the 1980s. We are constantly trying to resurrect domestic policies from the 1980s.” Again: the smoking gun. None of this is “about Trump” but instead about Trojan horsing agendas, which happens to be the radical Project 2025. What’s more Millennial than working around systems to upgrade an old system to a new one? He is private equity’ing in less than a decade, proof that anyone can ascend with the right help, which also means: you, like Kat Abughazaleh, like Gabriel Boric, should do something.

Then: the whole Signalgate situation, a conversation where Vance was focused on larger messaging and communication while using proper sentence casing but not punctuation (or emojis, which Gen X Michael Walz employed). But the fact that this all took place on Signal is another Millennial smoking gun, proof of the “shitpost-based government.” That’s why we have an unusually sharp, disgusting social-media-as-fascism White House: AI Ghibli depictions of immigrant deportations; a Valentine’s meme about deportations; incorporating killer dogs into the agenda. Vance may not run these accounts, no, but it’s clear that things like this “come from him” or his world given his smart entry into the JD Vance meme discourse — which all came from the right to begin with. His pushing for AI, his techifying the White House, his quiet-but-aggressive imperialism: like any good Millennial, he is doing his job with little credit as he awaits the moment to seize the throne.

This, as I’ve said before, is why JD Vance is the real horror show of these times: he’s playing by all the rules so that he can eventually have it both ways, pushing himself as a working class “progressive” Republican in 2028, to easily sweep the seat only to further advance this nightmare. Yeah, yeah, Gen Z are punitive and conservative and, yeah, yeah, old people are too — but the Millennial version has it both ways. That is why Vance is so scary: he can code switch like no one else. As is the story of a generation, we await our power era but, unfortunately, it’s already here — and the title holder, like the other title holders, aren’t someone we’d want to claim.