This might feel somewhat discordant, given that JD Vance's most prominent physical feature is a golf-ball head that makes his body look like a tee, but the administration he's part of is one that understands the value of performance. How else are you supposed to read Vance aligning himself with a broccoli-cut racist and against his own children? Or Vance joining Marco Rubio and Donald Trump to stage an ambush on Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy this past Friday? That they invited him to the Oval Office to call him an ungrateful broke boy is itself pretty nasty and evil, though the most striking aspect of the airing of grievances was its staging. It was less a forum for diplomacy and more a show for the public, captured by several cameras and conducted in front of a jeering press corps. The point was not just to humiliate a soon-to-be former ally, but to be seen humiliating him by a public who is being told that this counts as action.
That sort of geopolitical kabuki feels maddening and somewhat abstract, and while the nature of Vance's arrangement with political power and capital is such that he is largely insulated from consequences, the good news is that Vance still can be told to fuck off when he deigns to be among the people. That is not the same as meaningfully fucking off, but it must have felt so good to be among the gathered Vermonters who protested Vance's planned ski getaway this past weekend. Vance and his family went up to Sugarbush Resort in Vermont's Mad River Valley—if you ever find yourself there, check out Canteen Creemee—and instead of the peaceful vacation they imagined for themselves, they got screamed at. Around 1,000 people lined the streets of Waitsfield, and several people skiing alongside Vance on the mountain brought signs and yelled at him when they got the chance. Enough people were annoying or troublesome enough that the Vance family moved their planned stay from a resort to a private residence and eventually cut short their planned four-day trip.
TMZ obtained some footage of Vance skiing, showing that the protestors saved fellow skiers from Vance's ponderous, meandering skiing form. Am I supposed to believe that a guy with this questionable level of balance and self-awareness is supposed to be at the vanguard of restoring Western chauvinism? The best part of this clip is a child barreling into what appears to be a Secret Service agent.
This is all great, and while cutting short a ski vacation is not the same as reversing any of the horror already done by the second Trump administration, it does matter that a mass demonstration, even a small one in central Vermont, can make someone like Vance's life uncomfortable. The broader platform he's advancing is one of privatization and misery, an essentially anti-public agenda designed to strip the wires from what remains of American society to enrich the wealthiest people in the country and help them consolidate their hold on power even further.
Regular-ass people cannot currently count on their elected representatives to fight this, especially when those representatives are getting advice like "Play dead" and generally abiding by it, but what we can do is bother and harass these monsters. That itself is a performance, and a valuable one. It's an exercise of power for all to see.
