The New Yorker:

The Vice-President built his political brand on bashing élites. Why does he vacation like one?

By Jon Allsop

If one lesson has emerged this travel season, it’s that you really, really don’t want to be on vacation in the vicinity of Vice-President J. D. Vance. Last month, with the Trump Administration continuing to conduct sweeping immigration raids in the Los Angeles area, Vance and his family went to Disneyland, where, apparently, parts of the park were shut down for them. “Sorry, to all the people who were at Disneyland, for the longer lines,” Vance said, on a new podcast hosted by Katie Miller, the wife of Stephen Miller, a White House deputy chief of staff. “But we had a very good time.” Earlier this month, the Army Corps of Engineers altered the outflow from a lake in Ohio to raise the water level of a river where Vance would be boating. A source told the Guardian that the change would create “ideal kayaking conditions,” though the Secret Service said that the intention was to facilitate Vance’s security detail; Vance’s office denied advance knowledge. Miller, on her podcast, asked Vance if there’s anywhere else he’s dying to go. “Hopefully we can find some excuse, as Vice-President of the United States, to go to Hawaii,” he replied.

Last week, Vance and his travelling circus touched down in the U.K. He visited David Lammy, the country’s Foreign Secretary, at the latter’s residence in Kent, before heading on to the Cotswolds, a scenic area west of London that looks like what an A.I.-image generator might spit out if you asked it to conjure the British countryside. (If you’ve seen the Disney+ adaptation of Jilly Cooper’s steamy book “Rivals,” you get the idea.) Vance and his family reportedly stayed in a lavish Georgian manor owned by a light-bulb magnate, obliging me to ask whose bright idea that was. Residents complained to the British press about the associated inconvenience, recounting road closures (leading to, gasp, wet crops), bad American driving, and an indiscreet Secret Service presence. (One local official likened the profusion of agents to a scene from “Men in Black,” adding, “It was a bit over the top really.”) Jeremy Clarkson—the cantankerous former host of the car program “Top Gear,” who recently called Vance “a bearded God-botherer”—suggested that a no-fly zone had obstructed drone filming for a show about a farm that he owns nearby. This led to headlines claiming that Clarkson had joined, or was even leading, a “backlash” against Vance—though he subsequently mocked the claims of chaos by posting a video of a peaceful pastoral vista.

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