On Thursday, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), who is the running mate in this year’s race for president of Republican nominee Donald Trump, showed up to speak to a gathering of the International Association of Fire Fighters (a labor union) in Boston. And he was booed within seconds. The jeers began ringing out in conjunction with Vance getting to the mic.
“Semper fi, guys,” Vance said. “It sounds like we’ve got some fans and some haters. That’s okay.” At least at the beginning of the speech, a clip from a PBS News stream circulated by a rapid response team on Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign appeared to indicate the boos were significantly louder than the evident cheers.
The same Harris campaign team spotlighted on social media that the boos kept coming. Another surge of jeers came with Vance insisting he and Trump are “pro-worker” — which is, of course, not the same thing as pro-union. Vance lumped union members and workers outside of unions together, apparently attempting to tamp down any unique prioritization of unions in the Republican ticket’s policy approach. And he was doing this at a union event. For some reason.
Vance has been consistently out in front of everyday Americans since joining Trump on this year’s Republican ticket — including with a… difficult recent visit to a donut shop in Georgia. “I’m JD Vance, and I’m running for vice president,” he said. “Okay,” the employee to whom Vance was speaking succinctly responded.
It appears that the woman actually working the counter when Vance walked inside was not fully informed about the nature of what he’d be doing, and she asked Vance to not be on camera. “She clearly had not been properly warned, and she was terrified, right? I just felt awful for her,” Vance later said, according to NBC News.
JD Vance calls audience “haters” as he is booed at firefighters union conference pic.twitter.com/J8TI94gAIt
— Kamala HQ (@KamalaHQ) August 29, 2024
