WASHINGTON — Vice President JD Vance and top White House adviser Stephen Miller ridiculed “old” and “white” protesters who hurled verbal abuse at them Wednesday during a visit with National Guard members deployed as part of President Trump’s crime crackdown.
Vance, Miller and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth treated the Guardsmen to a meal of Shake Shack burgers in the Union Station DC train hub as demonstrators made themselves heard in the concourse.
Miller blasted the protesters as “elderly white hippies.”
“For too long, 99% of this city has been terrorized by 1% of this city,” Miller said. “We’re going to ignore these stupid white hippies that all need to go home and take a nap because they’re all over 90 years old.”
Miller added that the District “is not a city that has had any safety for its black citizens for generations, and President Trump is the one who is fixing that.”
Vance chimed in to say that it was “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’ve never felt danger in their entire lives.”
“It actually should make every American ashamed,” Vance said, “that the world’s leading superpower, our national capital, was unsafe for families to walk around at night. That is a disgrace. We don’t think that it’s acceptable, and thank God we have the presidential leadership to change it.”
One protester with a booming voice referenced a false rumor that Vance described a romantic relationship with a sofa in his memoir “Hillbilly Elegy.”
“Oh look, it’s couch f–ker!” the heckler bellowed across the station’s great hall.
“Are you gonna f–k a couch, buddy? … Go f–k a couch, JD Vance!”
DC has experienced relatively small protests since Trump federalized DC’s Metropolitan Police Department and ordered the National Guard to help patrol the streets Aug. 11.
The Trump Justice Department is investigating the alleged falsification of local crime data, which shows violent encounters at three-decade lows, and a handful of other states have contributed National Guard contingents — while hundreds of federal agencies also contribute to patrols.
Trump asserted control over law enforcement in DC after a former Department of Government Efficiency employee was attacked during an alleged carjacking attempt on Aug. 3, which followed the murder of a congressional intern in a drive-by shooting on June 30.
Miller said Wednesday that the handful of protesters would embolden the Trump administration.
“Me, Pete and the vice president are all going to leave here and inspired by them, we’re going to add thousands more resources to get the criminals and the gang members out of here,” he said.
