Former Bravo personality Jennifer Welch lit up the “I’ve Had It” podcast with a blistering tirade, taking aim at MAGA culture and singling out Vice President JD Vance with a barrage of incendiary claims. Welch alleged that Vance is “secretly gay” and a “failed drag queen,” telling co-host Tommy Vietor that Vance “wanted to be a drag queen” but “wasn’t fabulous enough.” She added that he “goes off to Peter Thiel’s gay boot camp in Silicon Valley” and returns as a “sociopathic queer-eyed freakshow,” before declaring, “he’d be so much cooler if he’d just come out.”
Welch’s remarks came amid a raw, profanity-laced exchange with Vietor, a former Obama aide. Vietor fumed about right-wing figures and the broader MAGA aesthetic, saying, “I’ve had it with getting beaten by the biggest f—— losers on the planet,” and arguing there is a false “perception that MAGA is cool,” which he called “driving me crazy.” Welch agreed, telling him, “we cannot lose our democracy to these f—— dorks,” then pivoted to her theory that some hardline conservatives are living closeted lives while pushing punitive policies.
“I have this whole theory that in the MAGA movement, there’s a group of DL demon queens,” Welch said, accusing unnamed Republicans of “browbeating everybody all day long” and then “getting on Grindr at night.” She suggested figures like House Speaker Mike Johnson embrace Christian nationalist policies to “curry favor with God,” while privately wrestling with impulses they publicly condemn. Vietor backed her up with a broader point about repression, saying many are “acting out in a way that is evil and cruel towards the part of themselves that they hate.”
In the clip shared by Fox News, adds to Welch’s growing portfolio of controversy. Earlier this month she referred to Trump adviser Stephen Miller as a “Nazi Jew,” a line that sparked immediate backlash from Jewish groups and conservatives, and even prompted on-air pushback from TV hosts who confronted the slur. Welch has not walked it back, and critics say her latest broadsides are part of a pattern of shock rhetoric designed to juice engagement.
Conservatives moved quickly to blast Welch’s comments about Vance, casting them as baseless smears rooted in bigotry. Right-leaning outlets highlighted the segment as evidence that liberal media figures are comfortable trafficking in homophobic tropes when aimed at political opponents, while supporters of Welch countered that she was calling out hypocrisy and weaponized moralism within the movement. The ‘I’ve Had It’ hosts have become a liberal media force, building a large audience with their scorched-earth style and unapologetically partisan tone.
Vance has not responded to Welch’s allegations via a statement nor social media. The allegations remain unsubstantiated and were presented as opinion on a podcast, not as evidence-based claims. There is no publicly available proof that Vance has ever performed in drag, nor that he is “secretly gay,” and Welch did not offer any. What she did offer was a rhetorical grenade lobbed squarely at a high-profile Republican, the kind of cultural provocation that keeps the nation’s podcast wars running hot.
