The most embarrassing aspect of Vice President JD Vance’s tough guy schtick is that he really does seem to think he’s selling it. His recent jabs at Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, the Democrat running for Michigan’s open Senate seat, as the latest cringeworthy example. As a recent Michigan event campaigning for El-Sayed’s Republican opponent, former Rep. Mike Rogers, Vance sneered, “Whatever you want to talk about, Abdul, keep my wife’s name the hell out of your mouth because she’s way out of your league,” trying and utterly failing to imitate the tone of a man who is truly outraged over an insult to his wife.
Vance’s act wasn’t just painful because he’s such a bad actor. It’s that it made no sense at all. With “out of your league,” Vance was trying to imply that El-Sayed said something sexually untoward about Usha Vance, or even that he hit on her. But El-Sayed did no such thing. Instead, the Michigan Democrat was responding to a racist comment that Vance made at a prior campaign event, where Vance falsely accused El-Sayed of supporting “sharia law” and fantasized about how horrified his deceased “Pawpaw” would be to see El-Sayed running.
El-Sayed picked up the unsubtle racist implications, and shot back on X, “So do we think JD is taking Usha with him back in time to meet Papaw, or no…”
Vance may not be as smart as he thinks, but he’s smart enough to take El-Sayed’s point: if the hypothetical “Pawpaw” is too racist to accept an Egyptian-American as a senator, then surely he wouldn’t be thrilled that his grandson is married to Usha Vance, who is Indian-American. By pretending the comment was sexual, Vance simply reaffirmed that racism is driving his rhetoric, because he’s leaning on tired tropes of non-white men as threats to women.
“He’s urging JD Vance to be a bit more reluctant to play such sordid racist games given his own marriage to a brown person — with whom he’s had four children — who herself has faced much bigotry,” Greg Sargent of the New Republic wrote, explaining El-Sayed’s response.
Sadly, there’s no reason to think that Vance cares, because the other reason his faux-chivalry act was so unconvincing is that he does not seem to like or respect his wife. On the contrary, he has a long public record of being nasty to her in public, often — though not always — disguising his cruelty as “jokes.” Sometimes he makes fun of how compliant her role forces her to be, such as when he bragged that “anything I say, no matter how crazy, my wife Usha has to smile, laugh and celebrate it.” Sometimes he portrays her as a shrew, whining last year about how he’d be “in trouble” if he forgot to mention their anniversary during a speech. These portrayals contradict each other — is she a doormat or a nag, JD? — but what ties them together is strong streak of misogyny.
By pretending the comment was sexual, Vance simply reaffirmed that racism is driving his rhetoric, because he’s leaning on tired tropes of non-white men as threats to women.
Sometimes these insults aren’t even pretending to be jokes, such as when the vice president’s communications staff put out a statement saying she is so busy washing dishes and scrubbing babies that she “forgets her ring sometimes.” On its surface, this may not seem too offensive, since there is nothing wrong with either activity. But the larger context makes the dig more obvious. Before JD Vance became vice president, Usha Vance was a high-powered attorney in Ohio, and definitely more successful in the legal field than her husband, who she met at Yale Law. Early in their time in D.C., Usha Vance let slip on Meghan McCain’s podcast that she isn’t exactly happy about giving up her job.
“In a dream world, eventually, I’ll be able to live in my home and continue my career,” the sad-seeming Usha Vance told McCain, after repeatedly resisting the host’s repeated attempts to get her to tell charming and romantic stories about her marriage, mostly because she didn’t seem to have any.
Since then, there’s been an unsubtle effort from the couple and their communications staff to create the appearance that Usha Vance has been brought to heel. Usha had a fourth child over the summer, a choice that has been aggressively portrayed as something the vice president pushed on his reluctant wife. So much so that bragging about how he strongarmed her into giving into him has become part of his stump speech.
“The Second Lady said, ‘Well, you can have one of two things,” JD Vance says in this “joke” he repeats frequently. “You can be VP, or you can have a fourth child.’ Ladies and gentlemen, I must be pretty persuasive, because I got both.”
It’s not funny, but the bit still kills at MAGA events. It’s not hard to see why. Vance has turned his marriage into a 21st century “Taming of the Shrew,” selling his audience the fantasy of taking a smart, accomplished career woman and reducing her to a submissive housewife. It’s a trope not just familiar to the right-wing audience through Hollywood, especially Hallmark movies, but seems to be a real desire among a lot of conservative men. As comedian Trevor Noah explained in his memoir, his mother taught him that the “traditional man” may want a “subservient woman,” but he is “attracted to independent women.”
“He only wants a woman who is free because his dream is to put her in a cage,” she told her son.
Usha Vance’s cage is a painful-to-watch online show called “Storytime with the Second Lady,” where she read children’s books to an audience that seems to have no actual children in it. (The comments on the videos are turned off.) Mostly it features Usha Vance smiling uncomfortably at right-wing guests who appear motivated not by a love of children’s literacy, but a desire to ingratiate themselves to White House. She has also endured a filming where Donald Trump openly leered at her and another where she seems to suppress a flinch when her own husband touches her knee. The purpose of this show seems less about children, but about sending the message that Usha’s transformation from careerist to hausfrau is complete.
Race is very much a part of this, as JD Vance has openly complained that his wife won’t convert from Hindu to Catholicism, in case there was any doubt that there’s a colonialist urge to go along with the patriarchal fantasy. It’s the one place where her otherwise robust public display of compliance falters. She’s even slyly insulted him, saying she didn’t need to convert because she grew up in “a very stable household,” unlike her husband. So it’s unsurprising that race is a sore spot for JD Vance, and that he’s lashing out about El-Sayed’s pointed comments. That is turning out to be a mistake, however, as it’s just drawing more attention to the incoherence of Vance’s personal life and his increasingly nationalist political views.
After all, male domination in the home is how sexism has played out for millennia, but the reason that racists have traditionally deplored interracial marriage is because it produces non-white children. As El-Sayed pointedly noted on a podcast months ago, JD Vance has “got brown kids,” and “at some point he’s going to have a really awkward conversation with his kids, like, you made your career hating people who are different.”
Whatever Usha Vance is getting out of this charade remains a mystery, but she still seems to be game to sell out the dignity of herself and her children to protect her husband’s political career. She went on Fox News to say she “laughed” at El-Sayed’s remarks and insisted that, while she never met Pawpaw, he must have been a great guy to have raised such “loving” people as JD and his mom. JD Vance’s mom, who is portrayed in his memoir as neglectful and addicted to drugs, also responded, saying she wants to “punch” El-Sayed.
Whatever happens, the contradictions in the Vance household aren’t going away. No matter how much JD Vance works himself into a “how dare you” phony froth when the issue arises, he isn’t going to be able to get people to forget that he married a woman that embodies everything he claims is antithetical to a functioning American society. El-Sayed touched a sore spot, and JD Vance’s defensive reaction said it all. If JD Vance runs for president, as he’s obviously planning to do, he won’t be able to escape an onslaught of other public figures making the same pointed observations.
