Vice President JD Vance was heckled on Monday during a visit to Union Station in Washington, D.C., where he met with members of the National Guard. The Guard has been tasked with overseeing the city’s security following the federal takeover of the DC Metropolitan area.
Vance was accompanied by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller when several bystanders began heckling him. One shouted an explicit version of the well-known “couch joke,” a moment that quickly went viral on social media.
“Go f*** a couch, JD Vance,” the heckler yelled as the vice president and his entourage entered the Shake Shack inside the station.
The insult stems from an internet meme tied to Vance’s 2016 memoir Hillbilly Elegy. In the book, he recalled a family incident involving his mother’s boyfriend’s poor hygiene, which later evolved online into the crude “JD Vance couch” meme.
Speaking afterward with reporters, Vance dismissed the hecklers as “crazy” and “communist,” criticizing the group for trying to block his entry to the restaurant. He also claimed that his family had been harassed by “vagrants” during previous visits to Union Station, though he credited the federal intervention with improving public safety.
“We have changed so much in nine days, and I thought it important to highlight how great of a space this could be, how easy it could be to actually enjoy something like Union Station if you just had politicians who stopped prioritizing violent criminals over the public citizens who deserve public safety in their own communities,” Vance said.
