When Vice President J.D. Vance and his wife, Second Lady Usha Vance, went to The Kennedy Center, in Washington, D.C., on March 13 they were hoping, like all parents of three young children, to have a night out. They didn’t expect to get heckled.
“I don’t think we anticipated that anyone would really notice,” Usha told me.
As the Vances were led by the Secret Service to their balcony seats, a smattering of boos coalesced into a midsize chorus. Someone said, “J.D. Vance,” and someone else said, “Oh, fuck him.” And then someone else yelled, “Kill that light!”—apparently hoping that, at the very least, they might be spared the sight of the vice president.
“It was about 20 or 30 seconds of some people booing and delaying the start of the concert, right as the conductor is about to come out, and there were a few other people clapping. J.D. waved at them, and then we enjoyed the show that we had come for,” Usha said.
From their perch, it didn’t seem like the kind of thing someone would record and post to X, where reporters were always sniffing around in search of a story—transforming a date night into a headline.
Usha seemed perplexed by the whole episode: “It’s a really good example,” she said, “of reporting in search of a narrative that tends to occur.”
And then: “We just go to concerts, right?”
Not quite.