JD Vance Turned Away From Restaurant Due To Everyone Hating Him
His advance team in particular really hates him.
It must have been a day ending in “y” on the 2024 presidential campaign trail, because over the weekend JD Vance’s advance team made him look like a giant idiot. Again. (Not that it’s that hard.) His advance people either really, really, really suck at their jobs, or they really, really, really hate JD Vance. Given that the team is all part of Donald Trump’s campaign and that the team has actually spent time with Vance, we’re assuming some combination of both.
Whatever the reason, Vance’s campaign team managed to look like a bunch of incompetent boobs in Pennsylvania this weekend when they tried to stop by a Primanti Bros. restaurant near Pittsburgh without actually notifying the fucking restaurant first. Naturally, the manager of the small restaurant took one look at the giant entourage touring with the vice presidential candidate and said hell no, you can’t come in here, we did not agree to be your campaign prop.
So Vance stood around shaking hands in the parking lot while his team talked to the manager, apparently only going into the store for a couple of minutes to pay for the meals of everyone there, a lot of whom were Vance supporters who had been tipped off early about his appearance.
Primanti Bros. later put out a statement saying that the restaurant hadn’t had any warning and the manager freaked out a little at the giant press corps and Secret Service detail that was about to invade the space, but they negotiated with Vance’s people and eventually everything got worked out. Vance himself was magnanimous, saying the manager just “got a little nervous” and no one should hold it against her, adding, “It’s a great local business, let’s keep supporting it.”
Who knew he even had it in him?
Now, there is an art to campaign advance work, as we understand it. You want your candidate to pop in to some Real America small business, or community center, or sprawling and vigorous orgy, or wherever. So you send people to talk to the business owners/community organizers/orgy grand poohbahs ahead of time to make arrangements. You set a time. You explain just how many people will be there —campaign workers, press, hangers-on, what have you. You scout the location and make decisions about where you want your candidate to stand while being filmed, you think about customers and employees you want the candidate to interact with. You get some local supporters to be at the location when you arrive, pretending to be customers absolutely surprised and delighted when the candidate walks in.
About the only part of this that Vance’s team managed to get right was tipping off some locals that Vance was making an appearance at the restaurant. So there were about 100 supporters waiting in Primanti Bros. They were of course pissed off that Vance got turned away, and they were very happy to tell the media how, as usual, they were the real victims here.
Like this asshole, the chairman of the Washington County GOP, Sean Logue, who ranted to CBS News:
"I'm being honest with you. I'm telling you that the way Primanti Brothers treated me and the other Republicans is absolutely unacceptable, and nowhere in their statement is an apology, where's my apology Primanti Brothers." Logue said Primanti's has been trying to call him but he won't take their calls.
Meanwhile, other MAGA fans have been flooding social media with poor reviews and threats of boycotts. Other Primanti Bros. locations have reported phone calls from irate MAGAs threatening violence. One store said someone walked in, threw a bag of trash down in the middle of the floor, and walked back out.
All of this stands in stark contrast to a Primanti Bros. stop by Kamala Harris last month, which went off without an apparent hitch. On Monday, her campaign had a little fun sneering at Vance’s people for sucking:
Look, there’s Doug, there’s Tim, there’s Gwen … the whole gang! And none of them appears to have been threatened with a trespassing charge or otherwise created an incredible public relations screw-up.
This is far from the first time Vance’s advance team has garnered its candidate some bad press by being bad at its job. Last month in Georgia, they stopped by a doughnut shop without telling the shop they were coming. The result was a hilarious video of JD Vance trying to speak like a normal human to the shop’s employees while they, clearly uncomfortable, tried to fill his order of “some sprinkle stuff, some of these cinnamon rolls, whatever makes sense” and get him the hell out of there as fast as possible.
And just last week, his advance team got him into a grocery store, where he had the press film him complaining that eggs had gotten so expensive, why, they cost $4 a dozen now! A good advance team would have made sure the candidate did not make that point while standing in front of a sign clearly noting that eggs are actually $2.99 per dozen. They also would not have allowed him to make that point while holding a container of two dozen eggs, thereby undermining his entire damn point that Kamala Harris is solely responsible for inflation.
So to sum up, not only has Vance’s advance team gotten him a ton of negative press —a giant no-no for any campaign, of course — but they also managed to rile up some of the crazies supporting the Trump campaign, and now the employees of the Primanti Bros. restaurant chain and its 43 locations are being abused and threatened by angry MAGA folk.
Success! If you define success as a near-total failure.
[CBS News]
Wonkette is kept rolling in Primanti Bros.’ giant sandwiches thanks to the generous support of our readers.
"I'm being honest with you. I'm telling you that the way Primanti Brothers treated me and the other Republicans is absolutely unacceptable"
It seems entirely unfair that this business should have made a decision about whom they would do business with based on their deeply held beliefs.
The VP debate should just be Walz and Vance in restaurants trying to order food.