The vice president has a line he reaches for when a protester starts shouting, and a growing number of conservatives say they can hear the script underneath it.

Protesters turned up at both of Vice President JD Vance’s campaign stops on Monday, Oct. 26, 2026. The first was an airport hangar in Belgrade, Mont., near Bozeman; hours later he spoke at Haas Metal Engineering in Topeka, Kan. Security removed three demonstrators in Montana, two women and a man, and Vance dismissed the people who interrupted him there as “a few yahoos.” In Kansas, he answered with profanity.

The pattern now has three parts: a curse word, an apology to the kids in the room, and a rising chorus of conservatives who call the whole thing an act.

A Curse Word and an Apology

Roughly four minutes into the Topeka speech, as Vance told 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 the shout.

Vance waited for the noise to die down. “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 he described 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. He added, in a somewhat odd voice, “He’s out of here!”

Nobody disrupted the rest of the speech, which ran roughly 30 minutes and 4,037 words, by the transcript.

A Preacher Who Never Ran Before

Vance came to Topeka to campaign for Kansas Republican Sen. Roger Marshall, his second swing through the state in as many months. The Rev. Adam Hamilton, a Democrat who has never run for office, has Marshall in a bruising fight, and the midterms are set for Tuesday, Nov. 3, with Republicans straining to protect slim majorities in both chambers of Congress.

Vance called Hamilton “a lab creation of Washington operatives” and “a career leftist who says we must repent for being white.” He criticized Hamilton’s handling of a child sexual abuse scandal at a Church of the Resurrection summer camp in the mid-2000s.

“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,” Vance said.

A warning against sending Hamilton to represent Texas also slipped out, and he quickly corrected himself. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum had the speaking slot before his, and Vance opened by greeting Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach along with state GOP Chairwoman Danedri Herbert.

Vance praised the Trump administration’s drive to scrap diversity, equity and inclusion programs, telling the crowd that Republicans could tear down further what he called racial hatred and racial discrimination if Marshall won another term. His own push for tougher railroad safety rules after the 2023 derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, had Marshall’s backing, he said.

President Donald Trump held his own rally in Mississippi the same day. After Vance’s Topeka remarks, the Kansas Republican Party announced another presidential trip to the state, to Salina — what would have been the third visit by the administration in under two weeks ahead of Nov. 3. That Saturday, Oct. 31, rally has since been called off, two White House officials said. Johnson County election officials said early voting was running at a presidential-election pace, and early turnout in Wyandotte County was triple that of the 2022 midterms.

He Had a Taunt Ready Every Time

Hecklers hampered six instances of Vance campaign speeches in October before Kansas. On Oct. 1 in Lakeland, Fla., he called a protester a “clown” and a “Democrat plant.” In Tyler, Texas, he labeled a heckler waving a Mexican flag a “crazy person” and told him to get out in a strange voice.

Earlier in October, a man seated directly behind him in North Carolina stood and demanded the release of the Epstein files, and Vance answered with a remark about illegal border crossings. At a Cincinnati rally, another man in a suit threw off his red MAGA hat and shouted at him; the crowd then heard Vance say the man hadn’t washed his hair in about three months.

Allies Who Hear a Bad Comedian

Conservatives who view the swear-then-apologize sequence as staged turned up in an earlier Politico report, published Thursday, Oct. 8. “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 same commentator said Trump’s profanity lands differently, because that is simply how he speaks, and compared Vance to a bad comedian who cannot resist a line about his wife, Usha Vance, not wanting him talking that way.

Behind the scenes, the vice president talks that way too, according to Garrett Ventry, a Republican strategist and Vance ally. Politico’s review of his recent remarks turned up swearing in Ohio, Georgia and Milwaukee, as well as at a launch event for the America.gov website, where he apologized in case there were children in the back.

Profanity can make some politicians seem more relatable and can show passion, said Maura Gillespie, a Republican communications strategist who once worked for former House Speaker John Boehner. The danger, she said, is when it sounds rehearsed. “It comes across as inauthentic, and it actually ends up backfiring,” Gillespie said.