President Donald Trump may have tasked his second-in-command JD Vance with selling the rebrand of the GOP’s tax law, but what the vice president is really concerned with is gratitude.

More specifically, he’s fixated on people who he believes are insufficiently grateful for what the United States has provided for them.

Take, for instance, former Vice President Kamala Harris. She wasn’t fit to lead the country, Vance said on the campaign trail, because she wasn’t “grateful for it.”

Vance famously clashed with Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the Oval Office in February over the Ukrainian leader’s failure to grovel to Trump for all the aid the U.S. had provided Zelenskyy’s country during its ongoing war against Russia.

“Have you ever said ‘thank you’ once?” the VP said.

Months later, the vice president complained to Fox News host Will Cain that the Democratic mayoral candidate for New York City, Zohran Mamdani, wasn’t sufficiently sycophantic.

“Does Mamdani, when you hear him speak, is this a man who feels gratitude for the United States of America?” Vance asked Cain. “Is this a man who feels grateful for all of the opportunities, the incredible bounty of this country?”

Now, Vance has found a new target for insufficient gratitude: MSNBC host (and frequent Trump administration critic) Joy Reid.

On Thursday, Vance reshared a post from the account “End Wokeness” on X, featuring a video of Reid and progressive writer Ta-Nehisi Coates in conversation at Xavier College last year. In the clip, Reid spoke about how her immigrant mother came to realize that life in the U.S. would be more challenging than she initially expected.

“When my mother came from Guyana she realized it is not a land of opportunity for people like us,” she said during the talk.

In his retweet, Vance again shouted about ingratitude.

“Joy Reid has had such a good life in this country,” he wrote, “It’s been overwhelmingly kind and gracious to her. She is far wealthier than most. Yet she oozes with contempt.”

“My honest, non-trolling advice to Joy Reid is that you’d be a much happier person if you showed a little gratitude,” he concluded.

When Vance labels someone an ingrate, it’s almost always a person of color: Harris and Reid are Black women. (Asian and Black in Harris’ case.) Mamdani, a rising star in the Democratic Party, was born and raised in Kampala, Uganda, before moving to New York City with his family at the age of 7. The exception is Zelenskyy, though the Ukrainian leader is, of course, a foreigner.

The racial implications of Vance’s language aren’t lost on Efrén Pérez, a professor of political science and psychology at UCLA.

Though Vance is far less overt than Trump ― the latter has a bad, bigoted habit of calling women of color like Harris and Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas) “low IQ” ― race still factors in, Pérez said.

“I doubt that the vice president knows about the science behind this, but his singling out of POC, including foreigners, aligns neatly with a prejudiced explanation,” the professor told HuffPost. “These are flat-out racist actions and comments directed at very specific people because by highlighting them, he taps into some people’s prejudiced thinking.”

The stereotype of the “ungrateful” or “always complaining” person of color is obviously harmful. In politics, it’s used to delegitimize the struggles and valid criticisms of marginalized communities.

“It’s consistent with a highly moralistic view of non-white others in this country as ’undeserving,” Pérez said.

Vance’s grievances tap into a greater anxiety among some white Americans, too, Pérez said: that they’re being replaced by minorities.

Up until around 2000, the average white person in the U.S. was fairly comfortable in their position as the demographic majority. They wielded most of the political power.

But there’s been a noticeable increase in people of color ― Blacks, Latinos, Asian-Americans and others ― reaching nearly 40% of the U.S. population. For some white Americans, anxieties about the country’s demographic shift toward a majority-minority population became more pronounced during Barack Obama’s presidency.

“For many whites, it felt like they were losing ‘their country,’ which is another way of saying, ‘Me and my group are no longer at the top of the racial pecking order in the U.S,’” Pérez said. “This explains the types of white backlash that facilitated Donald Trump’s rise in 2016 and 2024.”

Now that Trump is in office a second time, Vance and his followers feel seasoned and emboldened to fight politically for what they believe in, including the belief that America’s minority groups have a victim complex and need to be more grateful. (It’s ironic that they do so while relying heavily on white grievance, aimed at mobilizing white voters who now perceive themselves to be “last place” in the racial status hierarchy.)

The fact that Vance rarely, if ever, has directed such “you’re not grateful enough” criticism to white Americans is very telling, Pérez said.

There’s some American exceptionalism at play here, too, said Todd Belt, professor and political management program director at the Graduate School of Political Management at George Washington University.

There’s a strand of foreign policy conservatism that has long been associated with the idea that the United States is exceptional and beyond reproach. In their eyes, the U.S. is the world’s peacekeeper, and others have for too long taken advantage of that, Belt said.

“According to this line of thought, the U.S. spends so much more money than any other nation on defense and foreign aid, and others are freeloading off the U.S.’s generosity,”″ Belt said.

That makes sense when leveled at Zelenskyy, but the fact that Vance is using it domestically ― directing the criticism toward fellow Americans ― is something new. Although subtle, Vance’s repeated use of the trope can be viewed as another way of othering non-white Americans.

Given all that immigrants have done for this country, maybe it’s Vance who needs to extend a “thank you,” said Shaun Harper, a professor of public policy, business and education at the University of Southern California.

“Our country does far too little to express its gratitude to the descendants of enslaved Africans and to immigrants whose labor made America an economic superpower,” Harper said. “The nation is deeply indebted to these people, but the Trump Administration seems to believe it is the other way around.”

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) recently criticized Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas) by seemingly questioning the authenticity of Crockett’s Black American experience.

During an appearance this week on former Fox News Host Megyn Kelly’s podcast, “The Megyn Kelly Show,” Greene reflected on her well-documented ongoing feud with Crockett by taking several jabs at her Democratic colleague. The Georgia Republican accused Crockett of mistreating her staff, which prompted Kelly to mention a New York Post article published earlier this month that detailed accusations from anonymous sources about Crockett showing “diva” behavior. (Crockett has since shut down the allegations, calling them “lies” and “nonsense.”)

Greene, who is white, then pivoted to a discussion about the “Black American struggle,” sharing her opinion about whether Crockett, who is Black, really understands it.

“She claims to be, you know, from her people. She puts on this image that she understands the Black American struggle,” Greene said. “But let’s face it, the girl went to private school, she went on to … I don’t know what college … and law school — she’s a complete fake.”

“She’s as fake as her eyelashes, she’s as fake as her hair, she’s as fake as her fingernails and she is such a massive fraud,” she continued.

Crockett has since responded to the clip on X, formerly Twitter, though she did not name Greene in her response.

“It is funny that MAGA cultist want to challenge my blackness because of my education… Remember how they challenged Barack Obama & his roots? Remember how they claimed Kamala [Harris] ‘turned’ black,” she said. “Y’all are a joke. Walk a day in my shoes where your white supremacist friends send me hateful emails, death threats, DMs, & posts, and then you can tell me if I’m truly living the black experience in this country, UNTIL then mind your business.”

Crockett then emphasized that being Black has “nothing to do with education.”

Crockett is often the target of right-wing, racist and anti-Black attacks. She’s routinely criticized for the way she speaks and her use of African American Vernacular English (AAVE). Conservatives have made a habit of accusing Crockett of being disingenuous because the way she speaks doesn’t align with their views of how someone who attended private school should speak.

Case in point: In April, Fox News host Laura Ingraham accused Crockett of sounding “very different” in the past. “And now she’s going very … street,” Ingraham said at the time, as she swayed her head side-to-side.

The congresswoman had addressed some of these accusations before.

“I don’t have an ‘accent’ … if anything, it’s Texan, maybe mixed with a little bit of St. Louis,” she said in a TikTok video in March. “And then determining that my ‘accent’ is fake because of the types of schools I went to … seriously, y’all?”

And as it relates to Greene’s recent attacks on Crockett, Portia Allen-Kyle, a civil rights attorney and interim executive director at the racial justice organization Color Of Change, said that Greene “doesn’t understand the reality that Blackness is disrespected in this country no matter how many degrees you hold or how much money you make.”

Allen-Kyle told HuffPost that the Republican congresswoman showed her “own ignorance” during her appearance on Kelly’s podcast.

“She reduces the Black experience to some caricature of poverty and struggle— as if class alone defines Blackness,” she said. “That mindset exposes her bias. Greene thinks struggle is the only stamp of Blackness and she dresses up her ignorance as commentary.”

Furthermore, Allen-Kyle emphasized that Greene’s digs about Crockett’s “fake” eyelashes, nails and hair were examples of macroaggressions — not microaggressions.

“When Greene fixates on a Black woman’s appearance instead of her words, she’s playing an old, racist playbook meant to demean, belittle and distract,” Allen-Kyle said. “Black women’s beauty and choices have always been politicized, and Greene leans right into that racist tradition.”

“It was a macroaggression, rather than a microaggression,” she continued. “When young Black girls think about what a congressperson looks like, Congresswoman Crockett shows Black girls nationwide that they could represent their community someday.”

And there’s a lot more to unpack from Greene’s recent comments about Crockett and her ideas about the so-called “Black American struggle.”

Crockett was “absolutely right” in her response to Greene on X, Allen-Kyle said.

“There’s no amount of education [or] income that allows you to transcend Blackness — it’s made obvious every single day by the racist attacks aimed at us,” she continued. “Crockett’s very presence in Congress, and the fact that she’s constantly targeted, proves the point she made: Racism doesn’t care about your résumé. Anti-Blackness follows us into the boardroom, the courtroom, and even the halls of Congress.”

Deepak Sarma, inaugural distinguished scholar in the public humanities at Case Western Reserve University, said that Greene’s comments about Crockett are “consistent with the MAGA / Trump strategy to invent damaging unconfirmed allegations against prominent Black leaders and to question their intellect and capabilities.”

Sarma said that President Donald Trump and his “MAGA minions” continually malign others for “their nefarious gaslighting and fraudulent purposes.” They likened it to Trump’s attacks on Harris and her capabilities as a public speaker, or about her intelligence.

“In the world of psychology, this is known as a Jungian projection, where one attributes one’s unacceptable character, feelings, and behavior to someone else,” they said.

And by Greene suggesting that Crockett’s success “in a capitalist democracy makes her a fraud or inauthentic,” she’s insinuating that the “real” experience of a Black person is being “impoverished and a failure,” Sarma said.

What’s more, Sarma thinks that conservatives feel discomfort when they hear Crockett speak, or when she uses AAVE because it “contradicts their misguided belief that America is a monoculture, a white Christian monoculture.”

“The feeling that they are being left out and that they are not adept in the language justifies, in their mind, their rage and suspicion,” they said.

Sarma later emphasized that “Trumpisms are already becoming accepted in America” and that these recent incidents directed at Black people, like Greene’s remarks about Crockett, are “slowly becoming more normal.”

Allen-Kyle thinks the right-wing attacks related to Crockett’s private school education are ironic.

“Conservatives trash and defund public schools every chance they get, but they seethe when a Black woman gets a private education. Why? Because it proves what they fear most: that Black women can be smarter, sharper, and more culturally fluent than they’ll ever be,” she said.

“It exposes their real agenda — they don’t want Black people educated, period,” she continued. “They don’t hate Crockett’s accent or her education—they hate that she’s brilliant enough to beat them at both.”