WATCH: JD Vance Flips Off Crowd During Speech

Vice President J.D. Vance shared a vulgar gesture in front of a crowd on Monday night, but not out of hostility toward his audience.

Instead, the Republican was recalling the many times he has been shown the middle finger by “pink-haired” protestors eager to hurl epithets and insults at him and President Trump since starting their jobs in January. He did so at an annual dinner for the Ohio Republican Party, where he told his home state allies about the culture of the nation’s capital city.

“I know it’s not always easy to be a political candidate, trust me. In Washington, D.C., they have this thing where, I think it means we’re number one in Washington, D.C., but all the pink-haired people throw up this sign,” Vance said, lifting his middle finger.

“And I think, you know, that means we’re number one, right? I choose to take that as that symbol in Washington.”

The hand sign drew a hearty laugh from the ballroom in Lima, Ohio, where Republicans were fortunate enough to score the vice president for the state party’s biggest fundraising night of the year.

Elsewhere in his remarks, Vance expressed his appreciation for the party staff, donors, and infrastructure that first helped land him in the U.S. Senate on his way to the White House under President Donald Trump.

“I could probably thank half the people in this room,” said Vance, calling out the state party chair, Alex Triantafilou, and State Sen. Tony Schroeder — “the man behind the scenes” who has toiled for years to turn the former swing state solidly red, he explained.

“Thank you Tony for everything that you do,” Vance said as he cited their work together on his first successful run for the Senate in 2022.

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The speech came shortly after President Trump dropped an f-bomb while speaking with reporters about heightened tensions between Israel and Iran, where a high-stakes game of chicken has followed a fusillade of attacks on Iran’s nuclear enrichment facilities.

“We basically have two countries that have been fighting so long and so hard that they don’t know what the f**k they’re doing,” Trump said on Monday night from the White House.

Vance followed up on those remarks with his own assertion that U.S. bombs obliterated the three underground facilities.

“Not only did we destroy the Iranian nuclear program, we did it with zero American casualties,” he told the Ohio GOP while taking a shot at Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei.

But other lighthearted moments kept Vance’s speech mostly airy. He shared how Trump trolled him in the days leading up to his selection, saying he was kept in the dark “until literally the morning of the GOP Convention.”

That was just two days after Trump avoided a brush with death in Butler, Pennsylvania, where he was struck by a rifle round from a lone gunman.

Vance recalled flying to Florida to meet Trump for the first time on the campaign trail last year.

“It was the first time I had ever talked with him explicitly about becoming his running mate,” Vance explained, the Daily Caller reported. “And he said, ‘You know, I’m not sure what I’m going to do, but it’s probably going to be you, so go have fun the next couple of days.’ How do you have fun the next couple of days? When that’s what the president tells you?”