JD Vance got a loudly chilly reception at the Winter Olympics.
The vice president, who represented the U.S. as the presidential delegate to the Milano Cortina Winter Olympic Games, was greeted with a chorus of boos when he and his wife, second lady Usha Vance, appeared on the big screen during the Parade of Nations.
“There’s the vice president, JD Vance, and his wife, Usha—oop,“ NBC commentator Mary Carillo said during the broadcast of the opening ceremony. “Those are not—oh, those are a lot of boos for him. Whistling, jeering, some applause.”
A source inside the stadium also told the Daily Beast that, unlike most other national leaders during the Parade of Nations, Vance’s name was not announced.
The jeers came despite an advisory from the International Olympic Committee to refrain from heckling the U.S. delegation, as the organization’s president instructed in a press conference on Wednesday.
“I hope that the opening ceremony is seen by everyone as an opportunity to be respectful of each other,” IOC President Kirsty Coventry said when asked if it would be understandable that Americans were booed during the opening ceremony, given the “geopolitical backdrop” of the Games.
“No one is asking what country they come from or what religion. They are all just hanging out,” she said. “It was a real opportunity to put into perspective how we could all be. And so, for me, I hope that the opening ceremony will do that and will be a reminder for everyone how we could be.”
Former vice president and Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris trolled Vance’s unwelcoming committee, linking to the Daily Beast’s coverage on the IOC’s advisory to be nice to Vance.
“Everyone booed anyway,” the HQ account, operated by Harris’ team, wrote in a post on X alongside a video of Vance’s cold greeting. “Sad!”
The Department of Homeland Security’s decision to send agents from its Homeland Security Investigations unit to provide security at the Winter Games made a global stink, not to mention the images of brutality that have come out of ICE’s crackdown in Minneapolis, which resulted in the deaths of two American citizens.
Thousands of Italians took to the streets of Milan on Saturday to protest the presence of ICE at the Winter Olympics, voicing their frustrations with what many of them see as a desecration of democracy within the United States.
The Trump administration said that the ICE special agents sent to Milan to assist with security would be operating out of a single room in the U.S. Consulate, but protesters said their presence, regardless, was unwelcome.
“It’s not just for the Olympic Games, it’s about justice in the world. We don’t want here ICE,” Alessandro Capella, the head of the Italian Democratic Party’s Milan chapter, told NPR.
Vance in particular has remained a firm supporter of ICE’s operations in Minneapolis and beyond. The vice president refused to apologize to the family of VA ICU nurse Alex Pretti, who was shot and killed by two Border Patrol agents on Jan. 24, whom he smeared as a “domestic terrorist.”
When asked by the Daily Mail if he would apologize to Pretti’s family for labeling him an “assassin,” Vance scoffed, “For what?”
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