“Couch F***er!”: JD Vance Booed While Hyping Up Trump’s D.C. Takeover

Vice President JD Vance and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had to hear just how much Washington, D.C., hates them as they attempted a friendly photo op with Donald Trump’s federal forces Wednesday.

As Vance, Hegseth, and White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller walked through Washington’s Union Station, surrounded by a gaggle of photographers and guards, it was immediately clear that they were unwelcome there.

“Oh look, it’s couch-fucker!” one person shouted in a video shared to X by HuffPost reporter Arthur Delaney. “You gonna fuck a couch, buddy?”

The shouting built to a crescendo, and it became difficult to make out the jeers of individual onlookers. But one sentiment was clear: “Go fuck a couch, JD Vance!” the first heckler shouted.

The Team Trump trio had arrived to deliver burgers (bought at the Shake Shack in Union Station) to National Guardsmen hanging around the train station, well within the sights of their own photographers. Six red-led states have mobilized roughly 1,200 additional troops to join the 800 already unleashed on Washington’s streets, tasked with stopping crime—the rate of which was already down.

The group took a few questions from the press, shouting their answers over the chants of dissidents. Miller tried to dismiss the demonstrators as “elderly white hippies.”

Vance strained to hear a question over the sounds of people in the train station. The question was: “Polls show that a majority of D.C. residents don’t support the guard here. So what’s your message to the majority of D.C. residents?”

“I’m highly skeptical that a majority of D.C. residents don’t want their city to be—to have better public safety and more reasonable safety standards within Washington, D.C.,” Vance said over the shouting. “I don’t know what poll you’re talking about, maybe the same poll that said that Kamala Harris would win the popular vote by 10 points.”

Vance then ended the question session, clearly irritated.

In fact, a recent Washington Post-Schar School poll found that 65 percent of D.C. residents did not think that Trump’s deployment of the National Guard would make the city safer.

As Vance glad-handed National Guard troops, chants of “Free D.C.” could be heard in the background.

Another video shared by HuffPost reporter Igor Bobic showed the trio departing the station while deafening boos echoed off the high ceilings, the large hall bristling with contempt.

“Boo! Get out of here,” cried one onlooker.

It seems that the residents of D.C. have spoken—and they want Trump’s cronies gone.

Fewer and fewer Americans are choosing to be Democrats.

With just over a year until midterms, one of America’s two main parties is hemorrhaging voters, losing registered voters in all 30 states that track registration by political party. The change has been observed in blue, red, and swing states alike.

In total, some 2.1 million voters ditched the Democrats in favor of alternative politics between 2020 and 2024, The New York Times reported Wednesday. The drop has resulted in more registered independents, but it has also become a boon for the GOP, which gained 2.4 million new voters over the same period.

Last year marked the first time since 2018 that more Americans checked “Republican” on their voter registration forms than “Democrat.” The downward trend has sparked serious concern among Democratic strategists, who have identified it as a “hidden-in-plain-sight crisis” that needs a solution before the next presidential election.

“I don’t want to say, ‘The death cycle of the Democratic Party,’ but there seems to be no end to this,” Michael Pruser, who tracks voter registration closely as the director of data science for Decision Desk HQ, told the Times. “There is no silver lining or cavalry coming across the hill. This is month after month, year after year.”

The most contentious battleground states have also experienced the liberal erosion. Arizona, Nevada, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania all saw support peel away from Democrats over the last four years.

“In North Carolina, Republicans erased roughly 95 percent of the registration advantage that Democrats held in the fall of 2020, according to state records as of this summer,” reported the Times. “In Nevada, Democrats suffered the steepest percentage-point plunge of any state but West Virginia between 2020 and 2024.”

Meanwhile, Republicans are working overtime during Trump 2.0 to minimize future turnout at the voting booth. Since Inauguration Day, the administration has tried and failed to force Americans to show proof of citizenship at the voting booth and has attempted to take away the option of mail-in ballots.

Donald Trump and his allies have also made a target of voting software designed to identify potential voter fraud, advanced a Homeland Security agenda that has made immigrants fearful to legitimately participate in the American electorate, and generally undermined trust and confidence in the country’s process to elect its leaders.

President Donald Trump on Tuesday night confused Armenia with another, somewhat similar-sounding nation, leading him to mistakenly claim he’d brokered peace between Azerbaijan and Albania.

The gaffe, which occurred while he was calling in to conservative commentator Mark Levin’s eponymous radio show, is only his latest geographical flub.

The president raved on air about his peacemaking efforts, repeating his false claim about having ended six wars during his second term.

“It’s, you know, a lot of amazing, amazing things,” Trump said, before attempting to mention his recently arranged Azerbaijan-Armenia peace declaration, which moved the countries toward peace—but did not fully end their 37-year-long conflict.

“You saw the Azerbaijan. That was a big one going on for 34, 35 years with, uh, Albania. Think of that,” the president said.

Not only did Trump incorrectly call Armenia “Albania,” but he also hesitated uncertainly while stating the name of Azerbaijan. He ultimately bungled the country’s pronunciation (“the Aber … baijan,” he said), so much so that The Mark Levin Show’s transcript of the episode, as of this writing, has him as saying “Arab or Bhaijaan.”

In a recent Fox News appearance, Trump puzzlingly added an extra seventh war to his already misleading list of six accomplished peace deals. Perhaps the mysterious seventh was this fictional conflict between Armenia and Albania.

President Donald Trump showed off “Trump 2028” hats and other merchandise to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and European leaders—right after an extremely sobering discussion about ending the death and destruction of Russia’s war on Ukraine.

According to photos, he was keen to draw their attention to various items, including a “Four More Years” hat, a “Gulf of America” hat, a “Trump was Right About Everything” hat, along with the classic “MAGA” and “USA” hats.

It’s moments like these that remind us that the president is a salesman in his heart of hearts.

The Trump Organization conglomerate has made billions through cryptocurrency and media ventures alongside the merchandise, which is typically only used to fund campaigns. But Trump has yet again figured out a way to game the system.

“In addition to the campaign merchandise sold by his campaign, which all candidates and all presidents do … the Trump Organization also has its own online store, and they sell all kinds of Trump merchandise that looks very much like its campaign merchandise, but this money flows to Trump himself—you know, $20, $40 for a pair of flip-flops, a pair of beer koozies, a baseball hat,” The New Yorker’s David Kirkpatrick told Democracy Now! on Wednesday.

“He’s making, you know, millions of dollars—you know, I forget what the exact number was, but 20 millions of dollars over the last few years—selling this kind of merchandise, which is arguably competing with his own campaign and diverting some of the money that his supporters might think is supporting the MAGA movement and his candidates to his own pocket,” Kirkpatrick continued.

The words on the hats are as alarming as the open corruption they represent. “Trump 2028” has become a commonplace slogan on the right, though the president is constitutionally barred from running again. But Trump himself has alluded to the possibility multiple times, as recently as this week.

“So you say, during the war you can’t have elections?” Trump said to Zelenskiy. “So let me just see: Three-and-a-half years from now, so you mean, if we [the United States] happen to be in a war with somebody, no more elections … I wonder what the fake news would say about that.”

The Trump administration is apparently intent on lying about the impact of the president’s military occupation of D.C. on local restaurants.

While some data suggests the federal takeover may be scaring away diners, the Trump team keeps insisting that the very opposite is happening.

Appearing on Fox Business Wednesday morning, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum touted Trump’s crackdown, which is strongly opposed by most D.C. residents.

Burgum cited alleged decreases in carjackings and robberies—apparently, week-over-week percent decreases reported by D.C.’s police union, from which little can actually be concluded (in part because, as one conservative commentator observed, “robbery and property crime reports often lag the date of the incident by a week or more, making any short-term comparison like this liable to look more favorable than is true of the situation on the ground”).

Burgum also said restaurant reservations are “up 30 percent,” in a “dramatic change.” Here, the interior secretary was echoing Trump’s baseless claim earlier this week that restaurants are “busier than they’ve been in a long time.”

As D.C.’s local Fox station reports, restaurant attendance was down each day during the first week of Trump’s crackdown on the capital compared with the same week last year. The most significant plunge took place last Wednesday, when reservation numbers fell by 31 percent.

Conveniently overlooking these facts, Burgum seemingly narrowed in on data from Monday, which saw a 29 percent year-over-year increase in reservations made via the online service OpenTable.

However, this increase took place on the first day of the city’s summer Restaurant Week, during which local eateries offer promotional deals. Restaurant Week 2024 took place a week earlier, also potentially affecting last week’s numbers.

Reservation data aside, The Washington Post reports that Trump’s actions in D.C. have sent restaurant owners reeling.

One said that “reservations are low, low, low,” and, “The city is dead.”

Another, who said this month is on track to be the slowest August in his restaurant’s seven-year history (peak pandemic years included), told the Post that “seeing law enforcement—armored and plainclothed—in the neighborhood, casing our building and looking into our windows, definitely put guests and staff on edge.”