JD Vance was in the audience during the White House reception for the NCAA football Division I champion Indiana Hoosiers, a year after he embarrassingly dropped the trophy.
Vance watched from the crowd as Donald Trump hosted the undefeated football team in front of the South Portico on Monday, unlike last April, when he was on stage celebrating with his alma mater, Ohio State. Back then, Vance had trouble raising the trophy, which came apart in his grip.
The trophy—made from 24-karat gold, bronze, and stainless steel, with a football design at the top—is designed to be detached at its base so players can raise it up easily after the title game. Vance, however, had tried to raise both parts at once.
He joked afterward: “I didn’t want anyone after Ohio State to get the trophy so I decided to break it.”
On Monday, the trophy was back. It stayed in one piece, and no member of the Trump administration tried to raise it.
Vance’s office didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment from the Daily Beast.
The Hoosiers gifted Trump a personalized #47 jersey, a signed football, and a helmet. The president later showed them around the Oval Office, which he called “the most important piece of real estate anywhere in the world in terms of...victory and in terms of winning and in terms of things that are happening.”
In that room earlier on Monday, Trump, 79, appeared to doze off—again—during an event on maternal health.
In his prepared comments to the football team, a more alert Trump mentioned that Vance and Cabinet members like Interior Secretary Doug Burgum and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick were in attendance. So too were several members of Indiana’s congressional delegation, as well as the speaker of the state’s house of representatives and the state senate majority leader.
The president used the opportunity to boast about last week’s Indiana primaries, in which five Republicans in the state senate who had voted against a Trump-approved redistricting plan lost to pro-Trump challengers.
“We had a little insurgency in Indiana. That didn’t last very long,” he said.
