JD Vance Rushes to Delete Post Acknowledging the Armenian Genocide

Vice President JD Vance and his wife honored the victims of the Armenian genocide on Tuesday, sparking immediate backlash from Washington to the Middle East. The problem? His boss doesn’t recognize the World War I–era atrocity.

Vance shared an image of himself and his wife, Usha Vance, on X, honoring the estimated 1.2 million Armenians killed in the ethnic cleansing. But moments after he hit “post,” the statement was deleted.

“Today, Vice President Vance and Second Lady Usha Vance attended a wreath laying ceremony at the Armenian Genocide memorial to honor the victims of the 1915 Armenian genocide,” Vance initially wrote.

It was not immediately clear why Vance retracted the public message, though there would be plenty of obvious reasons to do so. Donald Trump has refuted congressional and academic consensus on the matter, refusing to describe the extermination event as a “genocide.”

Vance’s office blamed the slip-up on a staffer, according to a pool report circulated by CNN’s Jake Tapper.

“This is an account managed by staff that primarily exists to share photos and videos of the Vice President’s activities,” Vance’s office said in a statement.

The mass killing was conducted between 1915 and 1917 by the Ottoman Empire, paving the way for a homogenous ethnostate that would, a handful of years later, become the Republic of Turkey. Turkish government propagandists have long maintained that the Armenian genocide is a fiction and that deporting Armenians was a legitimate action—ignoring the estimated 1.2 million Armenians killed as the Ottomans forced them on a death march into the Syrian desert.

Trump repeatedly rejected congressional efforts to recognize the genocide during his first administration, but could not intervene in 2021 when then-President Joe Biden acknowledged Congress’s 2019 vote on the phrase and changed long-standing presidential policy by finally recognizing the calamity with the appropriate language.

Even before the mishap, Vance was already trailblazing administrative policy: His visit Monday marked the first time that any U.S. president or vice president had stepped foot in Armenia.

But back home, Vance’s blunderous backpedal was not received well by the Armenian American community.

“Turkey never tires of humiliating America,” said Aram Hamparian, the executive director of the Armenian National Committee of America, in a statement on X. “This time, forcing a sitting US Vice President to delete his post about the Armenian Genocide.”

“While it’s no surprise to see Turkey still strong-arming global leaders to enforce its Armenian Genocide gag-rule,” Hamparian continued, “it is deeply troubling to witness Vice President Vance—a man who loudly proclaims solidarity with Christian victims of persecution—display such weakness in the face of this foreign pressure.”

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt was asked in her Tuesday press briefing about Vance tweeting and then promptly deleting the post about the Armenian genocide. She curtly said there had been “no change of policy” since Trump’s statement on April 24, Armenian Remembrance Day, when he did not refer to the ethnic cleansing as a genocide.