Ever since Donald Trump announced J.D. Vance as his running mate, white supremacists have been in a frenzy over the fact that Vance’s wife, Usha, is a practicing Hindu of Indian heritage. The far-right has repeatedly attacked Usha and the couple’s interracial children online, and prominent commentator Nick Fuentes questioned how a senator with an “non-white wife, an Indian wife, and a kid named Vivek” could possibly “support white identity.” Ever the family man, Vance defended his wife from the racist attacks without actually calling out the racism part: “She’s not a white person,” he told Megyn Kelly in July, “… but I just love Usha.”
It appears Vance is back at it: During a Sunday interview with ABC News’ This Week, Vance once again addressed the disparaging remarks made against Usha while failing to denounce the white-supremacist attitudes behind them. “What kind of man marries Usha?” he said in an apparent response to Fuentes’s remarks. “A very smart man and a very lucky man … if these guys want to attack me or attack my views, my policy views, my personality, come after me. But don’t attack my wife. She’s out of your league.”
Vance also addressed the infamous 2022 Mar-a-Lago dinner between Trump and Fuentes, a white supremacist who has praised Adolf Hitler and attended the 2017 “Unite The Right” rally in Charlottesville. (Facing criticism at the time, Trump took to Truth Social to claim that he did not know who Fuentes was and blamed Ye, the rapper formerly known as Kanye West, for bringing him along as a dinner guest.) Pressed about the fact that Trump never denounced Fuentes, Vance claimed the former president issued “plenty of condemnations” of the commentator (where?) and praised Trump’s ability to “talk to anybody,” noting that “just because you talk to somebody doesn’t mean you endorse their views.” Vance also seemed to suggest Trump, who recently made headlines for calling Vice-President Kamala Harris’s Black identity into question, cannot be racist because he has spent “a lot of quality time” with Usha, giving her hugs and calling her beautiful. Sure, Jan.
While Vance did admit that he has “worried sometimes” about the attacks against his family, he sees them as par for the course in politics. “I wish people would keep it focused on me, but whatever,” he told ABC. “They’re going to say what they’re going to say. My wife’s tough enough to handle it, and that’s a good thing.” Weird way to be a wife man, but ok.
