During my Capitol Hill days eons ago, I made friends with a handful of Secret Service agents. It was during my crazy Dewey Beach summers on the Delaware shore.
Once in a while, depending on how many beers I had, and they had, I’d ask them questions about the job, what it was like, and who they liked and disliked. They rarely budged on disclosing any details.
But personalities leaked through anyway. I know they liked Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. And only one time I heard something negative. It was about another very high-profile individual, who I will not gossip about here.
They trashed this person because they did not like them. And the fact that it was so rare to hear them complain is exactly the point. These are people trained not to talk. When I heard them rail on this person, I was shocked, not only because it was surprising to hear, as it was someone I liked, but because they had real antipathy for them.
Which is why the scuttlebutt out this week says so much about J.D. Vance.
MS NOW’s Carol Leonnig and Vaughn Hillyard reported that agents assigned to protect the vice president and his family are “fed up” with a pattern of last-minute, expensive, and, I suppose by the standards of every prior vice president, unprecedented travel demands.
The story that broke it open was that agents were mobilized last Thursday to join a Marine Corps helicopter crew and fly Vance’s young son across town to a golf lesson at Joint Base Andrews.
The flight only didn’t happen because of thunderstorms. Marine Two costs taxpayers somewhere between $16,000 and $24,600 an hour to fly, according to Defense Department estimates. Previous vice presidents had their kids driven to activities in an SUV, like normal people.
That’s not an isolated and inconvenient indulgence. The Vances have reportedly used government helicopters on short notice to go house-hunting in Middleburg, Virginia. Warning to childless cat ladies in that area — J.D. might be on his way, but I digress.
Sources told MS NOW the detail has taken to minting its own dark joke about it that includes coins and stickers reading “Bobcat OTR Survivors Club.” Bobcat being Vance’s Secret Service code name, OTR meaning “off the record,” the internal term for these no-notice movements that blow up agents’ days off and force security plans to be improvised on the fly.
“The detail is tired of them not giving notice on things and making everything an OTR,” one person familiar with the frustration said. “He thinks he can still move around like a U.S. Senator.”
One source put it more bluntly, “That is RIDICULOUS. Pence and Harris never pulled anything like that.”
Vance’s office responded, of course, with a perhaps disingenuous statement thanking agents for their service and noting the “unique challenge” of protecting a vice president with young children. I am sure behind the scenes the quick-tempered Vance was furious.
Sure, it’s tough to guard kids. I can only imagine. The Vances are the first vice-presidential family with small kids since Al Gore’s in the 1990s, and it’s got to be a real logistical quagmire, but also for the Vances. I’m sure they want the maximum protection for those kids, and that’s understandable.
However, the logistics don’t explain why career Secret Service supervisors are telling reporters, and on the record no less, that they’ve never seen anything like this.
Here’s what I learned from hanging around agents that are part of a non-talkative profession. When people whose entire job is discretion start finding ways to vent to national reporters, that’s saying quite a bit about the nastiness that must exude from J.D. Vance.
The leak means their frustration has busted through professionalism. In a sense they’re just mirroring J.D. because, from the sound of it, he doesn’t appear to have much professionalism.
In other words, one can only assume that he must be such an obnoxious jerk, because if he was a terrific and kind man, those agents would gladly, and without complaint, go the extra mile for him.
And it fits a pattern with Vance. In April, on a trip to Rome, Vance stood next to Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and cracked that she “could’ve called me a jerk” in Italian and he “wouldn’t even know.” He must have sensed something from her too.
Last week, while in Milwaukee, he tried out a Northern Midwest accent, joking “Wis-cawntin” before trying again with “Wis-cawnsin.”
The crowd stared back at him in dead silence.
He’s had a similar moment addressing troops, where an attempted joke fell flat. There’s the childless cat lady. John Oliver called him an “abrasive MAGA a–hole.” Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear called him “arrogant,” among other things.
Before the 2024 presidential election, I spoke with Republican pollster Sarah Longwell, who was running focus groups that included plenty of Republicans. Referring to Vance, she told me, “I haven’t seen as much disdain for a candidate since Mike Pence refused to certify the 2020 election. I mean, the swing voters just don’t like Vance”
And neither, apparently, do his Secret Service agents.
I’ll say what I can’t prove and what I believe anyway, and that is that agents don’t do this over a guy who’s decent to work for, and gives them the respect they deserve.
Whatever you think of the politics, Secret Service agents endure grueling, thankless hours for people across the political spectrum without complaint. Seriously, they don’t complain, at least in my experience.
So, when the discretion cracks, the person on the other end of it usually has something to do with why.
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