The vice president has settled into a formula for dealing with hecklers — a curse word, followed by an apology to the kids in the room — and a growing number of conservatives see an act.
Vice President JD Vance brushed off the demonstrators who interrupted him inside an airport hangar in Belgrade, Mont., near Bozeman, as “a few yahoos” on Monday, Oct. 26, 2026, then reached for profanity hours later when protesters interrupted his second stop of the day in Topeka, Kan.
Three demonstrators, two women and a man, were removed from the Montana event. The Topeka stop, at Haas Metal Engineering, was a campaign rally for Kansas Republican Sen. Roger Marshall, and it did not stay quiet for long.
The Shout That Got Swallowed
Roughly four minutes into his Topeka remarks, as Vance was telling the crowd he had grown up in a town much like theirs, a protester shouted, “You’re a war criminal!” The crowd answered with a chant of “USA! USA!” that swallowed the rest of it.
Once the noise died down, Vance picked up where the heckler had left off. “The thing I’ve realized, having done these rallies for the last couple of weeks, is that the only chance the Democrats have is to interrupt and shut down the debate because when we have a free and open debate, the American people will realize that all the Democrats are selling is a fat load of bull****,” he said.
About two minutes later, while Vance was talking about pee-wee football teams sponsored by local businesses, another protester started screaming. “Now, ladies and gentlemen, we have another bull**** artist. Excuse my language, for the kids,” Vance told the crowd. In a somewhat odd voice, he added, “He’s out of here!” The rest of the roughly 30-minute speech — 4,037 words, by the transcript — went on without another disruption.
A Pastor Who Has Never Run
Kansas drew Vance for the second time in as many months. The midterms fall on Tuesday, Nov. 3, and Republicans are straining to protect slim majorities in both chambers of Congress. Marshall is locked in a bruising fight with the Rev. Adam Hamilton, a Democrat who has never run for office and who pastors the largest United Methodist Church in the nation.
Vance went at Hamilton directly in the Oct. 26 speech, calling him “a lab creation of Washington operatives” and “a career leftist who says we must repent for being white.” He also said: “But I do know the lawgiver in Adam Hamilton’s world — it isn’t Moses. It’s not Jesus. It’s (Senate Minority Leader) Chuck Schumer.” At one point Vance warned against sending Hamilton to represent Texas, then quickly corrected himself.
The vice president criticized Hamilton’s handling of a child sexual abuse scandal at a Church of the Resurrection summer camp in the mid-2000s. He called Marshall “a dear friend” and told the crowd, “Roger is always on your side.” Pushing railroad safety reforms after the 2023 derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, Vance said, drew “unbelievable pushback,” and “Doc Marshall was there fighting right along with us.”
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum spoke before Vance, who opened by greeting Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach and state GOP Chairwoman Danedri Herbert. The vice president praised the Trump administration’s drive to scrap diversity, equity and inclusion programs. Another Marshall term, he told the crowd, would let Republicans tear down further what he called racial hatred and racial discrimination. He closed on gasoline prices and cost-of-living frustration.
From Lakeland to a Cincinnati Rally
Hecklers had already disrupted Vance’s campaign speeches six times in October before the Kansas stop. On Oct. 1 in Lakeland, Fla., he called a protester a “clown” and a “Democrat plant.” A heckler waving a Mexican flag in Tyler, Texas, got labeled a “crazy person,” and Vance used a strange voice to tell him to get out.
A man seated directly behind him in North Carolina earlier in October stood and demanded the release of the Epstein files; Vance answered with a remark about illegal border crossings. A man in a suit at a Cincinnati rally threw off his red MAGA hat and shouted at him, and Vance told the crowd the man hadn’t washed his hair in about three months.
When the Swearing Sounds Rehearsed
An earlier report published Thursday, Oct. 8, found conservatives who view the swear-then-apologize sequence as staged. “There’s something deeper about American politics where people think you can fake authenticity by cursing,” a prominent conservative commentator, granted anonymity, told Politico.
That commentator said President Donald Trump’s profanity lands differently because it is simply how he speaks, and said Vance, like a bad comedian, cannot resist a line about his wife, Usha Vance, not wanting him talking that way. Garrett Ventry, a Republican strategist and Vance ally, said the vice president talks exactly that way behind the scenes.
A review of Vance’s recent remarks found him swearing in Ohio, Georgia and Milwaukee, and apologizing at a launch event for the America.gov website in case there were children in the back. Profanity can make some politicians seem more relatable and show passion, said Maura Gillespie, a Republican communications strategist who once worked for former House Speaker John Boehner. The danger, she said, comes when it sounds rehearsed. “It comes across as inauthentic, and it actually ends up backfiring,” Gillespie said.