Vice President JD Vance has deleted a post about the Armenian Genocide from his social media accounts in an embarrassing climbdown.
After attending the Milano Cortina Winter Olympic Games Opening Ceremony on Friday, he flew to Armenia as part of a much-touted trip to support a U.S.-brokered deal to end the country’s long-running conflict with Azerbaijan. But he accidentally broke ranks with his own boss after he and his wife, Second Lady Usha Vance, laid a wreath on a memorial honoring those who died during Armenia’s 1915 genocide.
In the initial now-deleted social media post, Vance said they were “at the Armenian Genocide memorial to honor the victims of the 1915 Armenian genocide.” Trump has long refused to call the systematic killing of Armenians a “genocide,” a term disputed by U.S. ally Turkey.
The original post from Vance vanished for a couple of hours before his press secretary, Taylor Van Kirk, posted a trio of pictures and videos on her own account with a watered-down caption saying it showed the vice president and his wife had gone to “lay flowers at the eternal flame and sign the guest book on the final day of their visit to Armenia.”
“This is an account managed by staff that primarily exists to share photos and videos of the Vice President’s activities,” a spokesperson said in a statement to reporters traveling with the second family.
The initial post was supposedly made in error by a staffer who was not part of the delegation, an official said.
No sitting U.S. president or vice president had visited Armenia until the Vances’ blitz this week, during which he signed a cooperative civil nuclear deal with Armenia’s Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, as Washington seeks to strengthen ties with the once-close Russian ally.
The Armenian Genocide took place in the midst of World War One, as the Ottoman Empire fought alongside Germany and the Central Powers.
The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum said there were around 1.5 million ethnic Armenians living inside the Ottoman Empire prior to the genocide, during which “at least 664,000 and possibly as many as 1.2 million Armenians were killed.”
The U.S. formally acknowledged the Armenian Genocide in 2021 under President Biden after a resolution was passed by Congress in 2019.
Biden’s recognition was the culmination of years of efforts that, until then, had come second to the desire not to anger Turkey, the successor state of the Ottoman Empire.
Turkey is a key geographic ally of the U.S., situated at the crossroads of Europe and the Middle East and close to southern Russia.
The first Trump administration refused to recognize the killings as genocide and rejected a resolution in Congress to label it as such. In April last year, on its 110th anniversary, the second Trump administration discussed the atrocity without using the word genocide.
Turkey continues to deny that the Armenian Genocide took place.
Vance’s arrival in Armenia came after he endured a chastening time in Italy. Attendees at the Olympics Opening Ceremony were told by the International Olympic Committee not to boo Vance as he sat in the crowd, two seats down from Italian President Sergio Mattarella.
It was no use. Fans booed and jeered when the second most powerful man in America appeared on the big screen.
Top EU diplomat Kaja Kallas chalked it up to “European pride.”
Speaking on Euronews’ Europe Today, she said, “Well, I guess we have heard a lot of not-so-nice words from the United States regarding Europe.”
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