The Vice President is booed at the opening ceremony of the Winter Olympics.

Hon. Friday night. Milan. The opening ceremony of the Winter Olympics. Sixty-five thousand people in a stadium. Athletes from a hundred countries marching in. Confetti. Anthem. The whole thing.

Cameras pan up to the dignitary box. They land on the Vice President of the United States and the Second Lady, both waving small American flags. Both smiling. Both waiting for the polite applause that is, in the script of this kind of event, the guaranteed applause. The applause that every visiting head-of-state-tier figure has gotten at every opening ceremony since they invented the format.

That is not the sound that came out of the stadium.

What came out of the stadium was whistles. Whistles is what Italians do instead of booing. Whistles is what Italians did then. Sixty-five thousand of them. On camera. On the international broadcast feed. In front of athletes from forty NATO countries.

The American broadcast feed, the people who pay attention to such things noticed, handled the moment differently. The international feeds did not. By midnight, every European wire had the clip with subtitles.

The President of the United States, asked the next morning, said he was not aware of it. Hon. He was not aware of it. The Vice President of his administration, the man one heart attack from the Resolute Desk, had just been whistled at by sixty-five thousand Italians and the President of the United States had not heard.

You ever notice how, in a normal year, the president has staff whose entire job is to tell him when the Vice President got booed at the Olympics? It is a very specific job. It is in the Communications shop. That person sat at their desk and did not place that call.

The Vice President, three days later, went on cable news to scold American athletes for talking about politics at the Games. The athletes had not, in the kindest reading, done much. One of them said it brought up mixed emotions to wear the flag. The Vice President said the way to bring the country together was not to attack the President. The Italians, in the stadium on Friday, were not attacking the President. They were booing the Vice President. That is separate.

Funny how the man with the most public criticism of his own performance, in the last seventy-two hours, is the one lecturing the figure skaters.

Funny how that works.