JD Vance Blasted by Protesters Over Zelenskiy Blow Up

Protesters plagued Vice President JD Vance’s vacation over the weekend, calling out the second-highest-ranking executive branch leader for the administration’s catastrophic agenda.

Vance was less than welcome during a family ski trip to Vermont’s Sugarbush Resort on Saturday, as hundreds of protesters gathered to express their outrage at the official and his connection to the Trump administration.

Demonstrators lining the streets in Waitsfield lamented the administration’s aggressive anti-immigration agenda, while others argued that the country “is in serious trouble” under Trump’s leadership.

“Our democracy is at risk, and we have people who don’t care about people,” Terry Bambrick from Richmond, Vermont, told the crowd, reported NBC 5.

A smattering of signage posted online captured the local resentment: “Proud of Mad River Valley, Disgusted by This Administration”; “SHAME”; “Go fuck a couch, not my country”; “Support your local co-op, not this fkn coup”; “bully JD Vance, go away.”

Shops and storefronts in the area also participated in the protest, placing signage out front to inform the vice president that he would receive no service in the Green Mountain State.

“Sorry VP, sold out,” read a sign outside of Mad River Glen in Waitsfield.

“Vance? We thought Elon was VP,” read a sign posted on the sidewalk.

Others turned out to express their horror that the vice president had bombed a potential peace talk between Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy on Friday, escalating tensions and instigating conflict between the two presidents by claiming that the Ukrainian leader had not been grateful for U.S. aid.

One demonstrator held up a sign that said, “Vance is a traitor” who should “go ski in Russia.”

As Vance departed on Sunday back to Washington, one local, Tommy Lovegood, had a message for the vice president: “This is Vermont. You don’t belong here,” Lovegood told NBC 5.

Elon Musk’s latest futile foray to get federal workers to spill about their week at work has seriously started to annoy members of Donald Trump’s own Cabinet, The Washington Post reported Monday.

Government workers began to receive a wave of emails Friday with the subject “What did you do last week? Part II,” the sequel to Musk’s ineffectual accomplishment email from the week before. Once again, the emails appeared to come from an account linked to human resources at the Office of Personnel Management, and prompted workers to respond by the end of the day Monday “each week,” copying their managers on their responses.

As soon as the emails began to arrive so did instructions from department heads—prompting workers to ignore the email.

At the Department of Energy, one official told staff not to respond to any emails prompting them to list their accomplishments. Employees told the Post that even their Trump-appointed leadership had grown weary of the Department of Government Efficiency’s tedious directives, as the agency was already enacting Trump’s sweeping agenda to boost fossil fuel production in the face of his so-called “national energy emergency.”

In addition to Musk’s emails, agencies have already been dealing with DOGE’s recommendations to implement massive layoffs. Earlier this month, the DOE laid off between 1,200 and 2,000 of its roughly 14,000 employees as part of DOGE’s government-wide purge of federal workers.

One DOE employee told the Post that the emails represented a “power struggle” between DOGE and federal agencies. Another suggested that the emails were designed to unnerve federal workers.

“It does give off ‘psychological warfare’ vibes to send these when they know folks would be heading to bed, or cooking dinner, on weekends in particular,” the employee said.

At the State Department, Undersecretary for Management Tibor P. Nagy sent out an email to employees assuring them that management would “respond on the behalf of our workforce,” according to an email obtained by the Post. At least one ambassador also sent out instructions to ignore Musk’s demand.

Once again, Musk insisted on social media that responding to his “pulse check” email was “mandatory for the executive branch.”

But, in the end, it seems like Musk’s email just isn’t good for efficiency.

One employee at the Environmental Protection Agency estimated that if two million federal employees spent 15 minutes responding to emails, at their average wage of $35 per hour, they would ultimately waste 500,000 hours and cost the government $17.5 million.

“That’s a conservative estimate,” the employee told the Post. “There are more than two million feds, and most of us spent way more than 15 minutes between trying to figure out what it meant, meetings about whether to respond or not and actually writing the email.”

The employee also pointed out that many federal employees already write reports on their weekly accomplishments, and that Musk’s redundancy-hunting email was ultimately redundant itself.

The Trump administration might exclude government spending from gross domestic product reports to cover up upcoming poor economic reports, and to hide the true scope of Department of Government Efficiency cuts.

In an interview on Fox News’s Sunday Morning Futures over the weekend, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick was asked whether the massive cuts spurred by Elon Musk’s DOGE initiative could have a negative impact on the economy.

Lutnick’s response was to cast doubt on GDP reports and announce a change.

“You know that governments historically have messed with GDP,” Lutnick said. “They count government spending as part of GDP. So I’m going to separate those two and make it transparent.”

This would present an inaccurate picture of the U.S. economy and complicate what is considered a measuring tool for the country’s economic health. Government actions impact the economy in many ways, from deficits and regulations, to tax and spending changes. With DOGE actions resulting in many federal workers losing their jobs, and more layoffs on the horizon, these ex-employees will be reducing their spending, which will have ripple effects on the economy.

Lutnick appears to be repeating what Musk posted on X on Friday. The tech mogul/fascism enthusiast also attacked how the GDP is measured, claiming that “a more accurate measure of GDP would exclude government spending.”

“Otherwise, you can scale GDP artificially high by spending money on things that don’t make people’s lives better,” Musk’s post added.

Musk was corrected by his own Community Notes feature on X, which pointed out that the government already has a report measuring GDP excluding government spending called “Value Added by Private Industries” that accounts for 88.7 percent of American GDP.

All of this seems to indicate that Musk, Lutnick, and the rest of the Trump administration are worried that the coming economic reports are going to look very bad and reflect poorly on the new president. So, they are attempting to discredit the numbers and try to juke the stats to make themselves look good. But that won’t change the real economic ripple effects of their decisions, as well as the lost jobs and less consumer spending, which voters won’t be quiet about.

On Sunday, President Trump announced his plans for a U.S. “crypto strategic reserve,” stating that he’d make the country the “Crypto Capital of the World.” But a closer look reveals the reserve may be nothing but a blatant insider trading scam to make his billionaire crypto czar richer—funded by taxpayer money.

Trump announced that he plans to add five cryptocurrencies to the strategic reserve: Bitcoin, Ethereum, XRP, Solana, and Cardano. Not so coincidentally, his crypto czar David Sacks has a venture firm linked to Bitwise Invests, one of the biggest crypto index fund providers. Bitwise holds significant amounts of the very same cryptocurrencies. Sacks promised that he sold his personal, direct holdings, but made no mention of his multiple indirect holdings.

If this wasn’t enough, just a few hours before Trump’s announcement, someone bought $200 million in Ethereum and Bitcoin, raising the question of who may have known about the plan ahead of time.

Sacks, for his part, has denied the claims of his indirect holdings, instead insisting that they are a farce. “I had a $74k position in the Bitwise ETF which I sold on January 22. I do not have ‘large indirect holdings,’” Sacks said. “I’ll provide an update at the end of the ethics process.”

Sacks is set to chair a first annual crypto summit at the White House on Friday.

Another former adviser to Donald Trump has called him out for bowing to Russia in his Ukraine peace deal, and the president does not seem to be handling it very well.

“H.R. MCMASTER IS A WEAK AND TOTALLY INEFFECTIVE LOSER!” Trump posted to his social media platform Truth Social late Sunday.

“We should spend less time worrying about Putin, and more time worrying about migrant rape gangs, drug lords, murderers, and people from mental institutions entering our Country—So that we don’t end up like Europe!” Trump wrote in a separate post.

In another post early Monday, Trump claimed that he was “the only president who gave none of Ukraine’s land to Putin’s Russia,” despite the fact that the deal cooked up by his administration thus far would fail to return Ukraine to its prewar borders.

The commentary on his first term national security adviser followed a 60 Minutes interview in which McMaster spoke on Trump’s excruciating meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy. On Friday, Trump and Vice President JD Vance overtly showed where their loyalties lie: Seated in front of the press in the White House, the pair refused to let Zelenskiy speak, allowed a conservative reporter to mock Zelenskiy’s wartime attire, and effectively leveraged the critical meeting for measly political gain by defending Russian President Vladimir Putin at the cost of denigrating former U.S. officials. And in doing so, they challenged America’s strongest alliances while ceding the world stage to its adversaries.

The lack of diplomacy derailed peace negotiations and prematurely concluded Zelenskiy’s visit, before the Ukrainian leader had a chance to sign a rare earth minerals deal that would have been a boon for America’s tech industry.

“Vladimir Putin couldn’t be happier,” McMaster told CBS, sizing up the events of the day. “Because what he sees is all of the pressure on Zelenskiy, all of the pressure on Ukraine, and no pressure on him.”

McMaster noted that Putin is a “master manipulator” with a deep understanding of how to work Trump to Russia’s advantage.

“He appeals to President Trump’s sense of aggrievement,” McMaster said. “And he’s been very successful at it because he’s a master manipulator and one of the best liars in the world.”

Russian forces crossed the Ukrainian border on February 24, 2022, which Putin tried to justify by falsely claiming that he needed to protect civilians in eastern Ukraine.

The U.S. and Russia opened discussions at a meeting in Saudi Arabia last month, seeking a conclusion to the three-year war, but the assembly conspicuously excluded Ukrainian leadership.