Strange Things About JD And Usha Vance's Marriage

On July 15, 2024, Donald Trump announced his running mate for the 2024 ticket. He selected Ohio Senator J.D. Vance for the position, announcing on his proprietary social media website Truth Social, "As Vice President, J.D. will continue to fight for our Constitution, stand with our Troops, and will do everything he can to help me MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN" (via ABC News).

As the country barreled toward Election Day, commentators and fellow politicians alike examined Vance's record, elevating the freshman senator to the national spotlight in a way very few people ever are. That's meant a lot of attention paid to his 2016 memoir, "Hillbilly Elegy," and to his tendency to make controversial political statements that have given him somewhat of a reputation as "weird." 

It's not just the nominee's own history that's been described that way, however. Much attention has also been paid to his wife, Usha Vance, and the way the couple's relationship might inform his politics. Usha's style choices have been contrasted with those of the flashier Trump women; her history as a clerk for controversial Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh has been examined; and above all, people have begun to dig into the way the couple's rise through the political ranks appears to have required some major concessions on both sides. As a result, and as the political campaign heats up, several strange things about J.D. and Usha Vance's marriage have emerged.

Falling in love quickly happens to the best of us. Despite all the ways we may protect ourselves from getting hurt, sometimes we just fall quickly and we fall hard. In the case of J.D. Vance, it seems that he fell hard — and then he tried to run away.

In his memoir "Hillbilly Elegy," the future senator described the early days of his relationship with Usha, back when they were students at Yale. For a while, he crushed on her from afar, admiring the direct way she told off their fellow classmates. "I thought about her constantly. ... Toward the end of our first year, I learned that Usha was single, and I immediately asked her out." Vance went on to reveal, "After a few weeks of flirtations and a single date, I told her that I was in love with her."

J.D. confessed that he wasn't sure how to process the emotions he was feeling. "I tried to get away, but Usha wouldn't let me," J.D. recalled. "I tried to break everything off multiple times ... I'd scream and I'd yell. I'd do all of the hateful things that my mother had done. And then I'd feel guilty and desperately afraid." A first-date confession of love followed by months of yelling and fear maybe doesn't sound like the best foundation for a lasting love, but nevertheless, J.D. and Usha have been together ever since.

Years before J.D. Vance was selected to be Donald Trump's running mate in 2024, he admittedly wasn't a fan of the former president's impact on American politics. In a direct message to a friend that was obtained by CNN, Vance wrote in 2017, "Can you imagine running as an anti-ACHA [American Health Care Act] populist who thinks Trump is a moral disaster? Where's my constituency?" In a different message to a separate friend in 2016, this one obtained by Vice, Vance used the word "loathsome" to describe Trump. "I go back and forth between thinking Trump is a cynical a**hole like Nixon who wouldn't be that bad (and might even prove useful) or that he's America's Hitler," he continued.

Nowadays, of course, Vance is on the ticket right alongside his former foe. The Ohio senator's about-face is one thing, but in order to present a united front in their marriage, the situation seems to have also forced Usha Vance to change her mind, too. A friend told The Washington Post that Usha was no fan of Trump, and as recently as 2021. "Usha found the incursion on the Capitol and Trump's role in it to be deeply disturbing. She was generally appalled by Trump, from the moment of his first election," the friend said.

It's no secret that J.D. Vance is now opposed to anything that might be considered "woke." As a senator, he blocked confirm dozens of ambassadorships because of how the appointees answered a questionnaire he gave them about LGBTQ+ rights. "The publics of many of our allies, and those countries we seek to build stronger relationships with, have traditional Christian, Jewish, Muslim, or Hindu moral values. If confirmed, how would you explain to them what the United States' promoting 'human rights for LGBTQ people' would look like in their country?" Vance asked nominees, according a memo leaked to The Washington Post.

In June 2024, mere weeks before accepting the Republican nomination for the vice presidency, Vance introduced legislation aimed at rooting out Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion programs in the government. "The DEI agenda is a destructive ideology that breeds hatred and racial division," he wrote in a press release. "It has no place in our federal government or anywhere else in our society."

One place that is committed to diversity? J.D. Vance's own wife's law firm. As the The New York Times reported, until her husband was picked to be Donald Trump's vice president, Usha Vance worked as a corporate lawyer at Munger, Tolles & Olson. The firm's website touts various diversity initiatives and highlighted an article from The American Lawyer, in which the firm is described as "progressive — perhaps radically progressive." It's unclear how the Vances have been able to square their differing approaches to diversity.

When Usha Vance took the stage at the Republican National Convention in July 2024, she was meant to introduce J.D. Vance in a way that got the crowd excited about him. Instead, when she talked about her husband's diet, her speech was met with some confusion. "Although he's a meat-and-potatoes kind of guy, he adapted to my vegetarian diet and learned to cook food from my mother — Indian food," Usha said, addressing a crowd that was holding signs reading "MASS DEPORTATION NOW." It's probably safe to assume that many in the audience weren't expecting to hear about Usha's immigrant mother's influence on their candidate.

Despite the line in Usha's speech about Vance embracing a meatless diet, a spokesperson insisted to the newspaper that the vice presidential nominee is not, in fact, a vegetarian after all. NYU Professor Krishnendu Ray picked apart the strange contradiction at the center of the line, noting that food choices have become inherently politicized. "How do you take these two systems ... and reconcile them?" Ray asked. "The meat and potatoes — the white nationalism that J.D. Vance is trying to get credentialed in — and Usha Vance's vegetarianism ... It feels incongruent."

After J.D. Vance was chosen as Donald Trump's running mate, a certain subset of the Republican base began making racist online attacks against Usha Vance. White nationalist Nick Fuentes, for example, railed against J.D. and Usha's marriage in a podcast. "White people are being systematically replaced in America and in Europe through immigration and — to a much-lesser extent — due to intermarrying," Fuentes said (via The Washington Post). "This guy has a non-White wife."

Additionally, an ABC reporter prompted J.D. to reconcile the fact that Trump had sat down for a meal with Fuentes, whom the reporter also pointed out had rhetorically asked, "What kind of a man marries somebody named Usha? Clearly he doesn't value his racial identity, his heritage." First, J.D. took the opportunity to praise his new boss' willingness to sit down with white supremacists like Fuentes. "The one thing I like about Donald Trump is he actually will talk to anybody, but just because you talk to somebody doesn't mean you endorse their views," he said. Later, he went on to caution people against attacking his wife before adding, "People are going to say what they're going to say. My wife is tough enough to handle it."

It's not the only clunky, half-hearted defense J.D. has offered regarding his wife. Appearing on former Fox News host Megyn Kelly's podcast, J.D. said, "Obviously, she's not a white person; we've been attacked by some white supremacists over that. But I just, I love Usha. She's such a good mom." After video of the exchange made the rounds online, observers took to X, formerly Twitter, to question why J.D. hadn't defended her more strongly. One social media user wrote, "Who speaks about their wife this way?"

One of the most awkward things about being a politician's partner has to be the fact that they are put on the spot to defend their spouse's comments. When the comments are themselves strange, it's tough to get through that situation without making things even weirder. That was the case when Usha Vance was asked to talk about her husband's much-publicized opinions about women without children.

"We're effectively run in this country via the Democrats, via our corporate oligarchs, by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they've made," J.D. Vance told Tucker Carlson on Fox News back in 2021. "And so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too," he said. He insisted that people without children don't have a vested interest in the future of the country, making people like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Kamala Harris unfit for leadership. (Harris has two stepkids, for the record).

When Usha was asked about the remarks her husband made on Fox News, she defended her husband, albeit in a strange way. "J.D. absolutely at the time and today would never, ever want to say something to hurt someone who was trying to have a family," she said. In other words, people with fertility struggles weren't his target; people who've chosen not to have children were. Naturally, this "clarification," much like J.D.'s original remarks, didn't sit well with many.

Shortly after J.D. Vance was picked to be Donald Trump's running mate, President Joe Biden dropped out of the race, elevating Vice President Kamala Harris to the nomination. Sadly, many of the subsequent attacks centered around Harris' race. Whereas many commentators pointed out the potentially historic nature of what would be the country's first Black woman president, Trump and company decided to suggest that Harris might not actually be Black. "She was always of Indian heritage, and she was only promoting Indian heritage. I did not know she was Black until a number of years ago when she happened to turn Black, and now she wants to be known as Black," Trump said at the National Association of Black Journalists conference. "So, I don't know, is she Indian or is she Black?"

The answer is, of course, both. Kamala Harris' mother is of Indian descent, and her father is of Jamaican descent. That's a concept that should be familiar to J.D. Vance, considering his own children have a mother of Indian descent and a father of a different ethnicity, white in this case. Instead, though, J.D. echoed Trump's comments, telling CNN, "I believe that Kamala Harris is whatever she says she is, but I believe importantly that President Trump is right that she's a chameleon."

Users on X, formerly Twitter, called out J.D.'s odd response. One wrote, "can someone ask jd vance if his kids are indian or white and see if he understands being mixed then? and then we can be done with this convo?"