A screenshot authentically shows that U.S. Vice President JD Vance wrote on X: “I’m looking at every legal option to avoid being the one who swears Abdul El-Sayed into office. After the level of disrespect he’s shown me he cant seriously expect me to stand there and do him that honor.”
In early November, a screenshot spread purportedly showing that Vice President JD Vance posted a message on X saying he was trying to find a way to avoid being the person who swears in Michigan’s Democratic Senator-elect Abdul El-Sayed.
People shared the alleged post, which does not contain a date, on X and Facebook. It reads:
I’m looking at every legal option to avoid being the one who swears Abdul El-Sayed into office. After the level of disrespect he’s shown me he cant seriously expect me to stand there and do him that honor.
The claim circulated after El-Sayed defeated his Republican opponent, Mike Rogers, on Election Day.
As president of the Senate, as per the Constitution, the incumbent vice president swears-in senators when a new Congress convenes, meaning Vance is set to swear El-Sayed in on Jan. 3, 2027.
In short, the screenshot shows a fake X post that is not on Vance’s verified account. The image appears to originate from Idisobey, a Facebook page known for posting fabricated social media posts and false claims, one of which Snopes has previously debunked.
A manager of the account posted the fake screengrab on Nov. 7 (screenshotted).
We contacted the page’s manager to ask why they had created the fake post without a disclaimer about its inauthenticity or possible satirical intent. We will update this article if we receive a response.
Searching Vance’s X page for posts mentioning El-Sayed returns only one result, as of this writing. That post, dated Oct. 27, does not match the one in the fake screenshot. Instead, it includes a video of the vice president speaking at a rally in Michigan, and text that reads, “Let’s send Abdul packing and tell him we don’t want people who hate our country in the US Senate.”
A reverse image search of the screengrab on Google only returns examples of users sharing the fake post in November, along with some calling out that it is fabricated. A similar reverse image search on Tin Eye returned no results.
Likewise, a Google search for verbatim keywords from the fabricated post returns no evidence of Vance ever producing such a comment (archived).
The screenshot spread following the Democratic Party’s major victories in the 2026 U.S. midterm elections. Vance backed Rogers in the Michigan race and lobbed insults and criticisms at El-Sayed throughout the campaign.
In El-Sayed’s victory speech, he directed a remark at Vance when he said (from 9:00 onward), “JD, habibi, there is this delicious irony in the fact that you’re constitutionally obligated to swear me in, in January,” referring to the Oath of Senators, referenced above, that specifies the president of the Senate — the U.S. vice president — will administer the oath of office to those who were elected.
Fake posts by politicians and public figures is a trope Snopes regularly addresses. For example, we previously debunked a claim that tech mogul Elon Musk said Teslas could not be used to dodge a military draft, and a rumor that Vance posted a memorial to an expensive couch lost in the 2025 Texas floods.
