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JD Vance's Brutal Public Booing Is Prompting Quite The Strong Reaction Online
Kimberley Richards
Updated Sat, August 23, 2025
Vice President JD Vance has likely become all too familiar with getting relentlessly booed and heckled while out in public. And for many people on social media who oppose the Trump administration, the loud protests have been quite satisfying.
On Wednesday, Vance was accompanied by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Deputy White House Chief of Staff Stephen Miller when he was heckled and booed during a visit to Washington, D.C.’s Union Station amid President Donald Trump’s militarized takeover of the city’s police.
In a video clip captured by HuffPost’s Igor Bobic, loud boos can be heard from protesters in Union Station as Vance can be seen walking in the distance with security. In other clips posted on X, protesters can be heard chanting: “From Washington to Palestine, occupation is a crime!” and “Free D.C.!”
Other chants directed at Vance were a bit more crude. One video captured by HuffPost’s Arthur Delaney showed Vance walking as someone yelled,“Go fuck a couch JD Vance!” — a reference to a made-up viral meme.
But Vance has been no stranger to this kind of protesting and heckling from the public. The vice president was booed while he vacationed with his family during a trip to Disneyland in July and he was met with hundreds of furious protesters holding up signs during a family vacation to Vermont in March. He also received fierce boos from a crowd at the Kennedy Center in D.C. that same month, while attending a concert with his wife, second lady Usha Vance.
And each time a video showing Vance getting relentlessly booed makes rounds on the internet, social media users take to X to celebrate. A common theme? People are feeling satisfied — and maybe even hopeful.
“I know it’s not much, but booing JD Vance does feel nice,” one X user wrote back in March after Vance visited the Kennedy Center. “It’s good for him to understand that most of America is not a bunch of fawning sycophants and supplicants like he’s used to at Mar-a-Lago and Fox News studios. The booers showed more defiance than Chuck Schumer did.”
“JD Vance getting heckled and booed everywhere he tries to go on vacation or out to eat is rebuilding my hope in America,” another X user wrote in August.
“This man can’t go anywhere in the world without getting booed and I love that for him,” another X user wrote after Vance visited Union Station this week.
Kari J. Winter, a professor of American studies at the University at Buffalo, emphasized that these protests are an “act of American patriotism.”
“Protesting against tyrannical power and corruption is the foundational act of American patriotism,” she said. “The protests that we are witnessing across the country today are fueled by the spirit of resistance that inflamed Boston in the Age of Revolution.
“It is the duty of everyone who loves this country to speak up in whatever ways they can against the Trump administration’s assault on every aspect of American society that has traditionally offered a gold standard to the world,” she continued, adding: “In place of gold standards, Trump promotes gilded baubles, golden toilets and gaudy ballrooms. ”
Winter said that like Trump, Vance and Hegseth are “bludgeoning the best and brightest American people and institutions.”
She pointed out that the Trump administration has been taking a “sledgehammer to American gold standards,” which, among many examples, include: attacks on universities, the free press, due process and on efforts to save lives and combat diseases through agencies like the United States Agency for International Development and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
While speaking to reporters at Union Station on Wednesday, as protesters could be heard chanting in the background, Vance chided the protesters as “a few crazy liberals who are screaming at the vice president.”
Winter called Vance’s comments about the protesters “pathetic self-justifications.”
“JD Vance’s pathetic self-justifications echo the age-old attitude of royal underlings who can hardly believe that ordinary people resent their high-handed ‘let-them-eat-cake’ airs,” she said.
While many are celebrating the boos and expletive-filled chants being leveled at Vance in public, you may be wondering about your rights, or you may have legal questions about these kinds of protests — especially considering the current political climate.
Raymond Ku, a professor of law at Case Western Reserve University School of Law, told HuffPost that the “short answer” is that it “all should be protected by the First Amendment.”
“There are a couple areas of speech that are less protected ... the primary one here would be essentially threats, threats to the vice president, threats to anyone else whether it’s a public official or regular human being,” he said. “Along those lines, it doesn’t even have to mean to carry it out, it would just have be a true threat.”
Ku said that people may, in some cases, consider whether throwing an insult is an example of “fighting words,” in which someone means to cause a fight. “Traditionally, the courts have also said [that] could be punished,” he said.
But generally speaking, saying or yelling critical things at elected officials in public is “very protected,” he explained. Though Ku emphasized that “doesn’t mean as we’ve seen with this administration that there won’t be an effort to try to punish people.”
And as for people yelling humiliating expletive-filled chants at Vance — especially ones that have to do with couches — Ku said that should also be protected completely.
“The fighting words doctrine is essentially saying something to another person face-to-face, to provoke the average person to want to engage in violence,” he said. “So it’s a little flexible, but still, it’s very hard to overcome.”
But yelling couch-related insults at Vance that may cause embarrassment “isn’t the kind of speech that can be criminally punished,” he said, before later explaining that a true threat is one that makes you fearful of bodily harm.
And as for the importance of all the various kinds of protests happening against the Trump administration, Winter emphasized that we “have a clear choice in the United States today.”
“We can submit to endless lies, bottomless grift, escalating cruelty, and the terrorism of unfettered power,” she said. “Or we can stand up and boo, shout, wave signs. Whatever your platform, now is the time.”
“If we don’t protest, Trump will soon impose martial law on the entire country like he has in Washington D.C.” she continued. “Booing, heckling, expletives, protest signs, editorials, investigative journalism, art, music, dance — any and every way you use your voice to dissent against tyranny is an act of love for your country.”
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