Vice President J.D. Vance, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller were met with a hostile welcome at Washington, D.C.’s Union Station on Wednesday.
Their visit came as the National Guard had been camped out around the iconic station as part of President Donald Trump’s crime crackdown in the nation’s capital.
Bystanders looked on as the trio was met with hecklers in the station’s marble lobby as they came confidently strolling through with their entourage.
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“You’re an embarrassment to Ohio,” one woman could be heard shouting as Vance kept a smile plastered on his face.
“F***ing nazi,” another man wearing a backpack shouted while taking video on his phone as the group marched through.
“Get the f*** out of my city,” shouted a third man.
Others could be heard chanting “free DC” as video showed the group casually walking into Union Station’s Shake Shack restaurant.
Other protesters shouted about the war in Gaza and to “free Palestine.”
In another video taken of their entrance, a man could be heard shouting at Vance, “Oh look, it’s couch f---er. You going to f--- a couch, buddy?” in a reference to the joke that plagued the vice president on the campaign trail.
Upon entering the restaurant, Vance mingled with some service members, many of whom said they were from South Carolina. He took a few pictures while thanking them for their service and joked that the visit was “a hell of a lot more fun” than what he did most days.
“We ought to be able to enjoy great American cities. That’s what we’re trying to do in the Trump administration,” Vance told reporters from inside the Shake Shack as protesters could still be heard in the background.
As they spoke, a box of burgers sat in front of them, and National Guard members surrounded them. Chants of “Free DC” could still be heard in the background.
“We’re committed to this mission just like the one at the southern border and in Los Angeles,” Hegseth said. “Our law enforcement officers deserve to be able to do their jobs safely.”
The defense secretary gestured to the box of cheeseburgers in front of him and declared he “always liked a good cheeseburger” when he was in uniform, so he was hopeful he could deliver a few of them.
The Trump administration announced earlier this month that it was deploying hundreds of National Guard troops to the nation’s capital to combat crime. Multiple Republican-led states, including West Virginia, South Carolina, Ohio, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Tennessee, have all rushed to send additional troops to D.C.
However, critics have observed that the service members have largely been stationed along the National Mall and at Union Station, two largely low-crime destinations visited by millions of tourists every year.
In an unhinged rant, Miller then said they were going to “add thousands more resources to this city to get the criminals and the gang members out of here.”
He argued they were going to ignore the “stupid white hippies” protesting, who he claimed should go home and “take a nap because they’re all over 90 years old,” despite the hecklers at Union Station appearing to be all different ages.
“It’s kind of bizarre that we have a bunch of old, primarily white people, who are out there protesting the policies that keep people safe when they never felt danger in their entire lives,” Vance angrily added.
Recapping his field trip on Fox News later that night, the vice president deflected on host Laura Ingraham’s description of the appearance as “eventful,” claiming instead he had heard from “a couple of friends” who said the area now “feels safer.”
“Living with lawlessness and disorder,” he added, “is fundamentally a question of political will.”
“If you’ve got the political will to enforce the law, you can make even cities like D.C. safe again, and that’s what we are demonstrating. And I hope that the American people take an important lesson from this because, obviously, D.C. is a federal city. New York, L.A., these places are not,” he said.
“I hope the American people just recognize that you don’t have to live with lawlessness. You don’t have to live with third-world murder rates. If you just take control of these cities, you can make them save places to live again.”
