Secret Service agents “fed up” with JD Vance after request to fly his son to golf lessons on a military helicopter
JD Vance wrote a whole book about growing up poor. Now his Secret Service detail is fed up with flying his kid to golf lessons on a military helicopter.
According to a bombshell report from MS NOW’s Carol Leonnig and Vaughn Hillyard, agents assigned to protect the vice president and his family are venting internally about what they describe as an unprecedented use of government resources, including a plan last week to put Vance’s elementary school aged son on Marine Two to get him to a golf lesson at Joint Base Andrews. The trip was only scrapped because of thunderstorms.
Operating that helicopter costs taxpayers between $16,000 and $24,600 per hour. As one person with knowledge of the trip put it: “That is RIDICULOUS. Pence and Harris never pulled anything like that.”
Current and former Secret Service supervisors told MS NOW there’s no precedent for using a government chopper to shuttle a vice president’s child to a local activity. Previous vice presidents had their kids driven in SUVs like everyone else’s protectees, and they gave their details days of notice before travel.
Not the Vances. Agents say the family constantly springs last-minute trips on the team, including several hasty helicopter runs to Middleburg, Virginia so the couple could house hunt. “They change everything,” one source said. “They don’t stick to their schedules, and that costs s**t-tons of taxpayer money.” Another said Vance “thinks he can still move around like a U.S. Senator.”
The frustration has gotten so bad that agents made custom coins and stickers mocking the vice president, featuring his Secret Service code name and the words “Bobcat OTR Survivors Club” with the motto “Advance. OTR. Repeat.” That’s agents joking that all their careful advance security work gets thrown in the trash every time the Vances change plans on a whim.
This is the same JD Vance who built his entire political brand on Hillbilly Elegy and looking out for forgotten working people. The same guy who joked on a podcast that people now go to the grocery store for him and cook all his food, while admitting that in this job you have to watch out or you could become “an entitled a**hole.”
The agents guarding his family, working canceled days off and endless overtime at a chronically understaffed agency, seem to think that ship has sailed.