Usha Vance's Footwear Fails That Were Almost As Bad As Her Senior Citizen Sneakers

J.D. Vance's wife Usha Vance might be a newcomer in the Trumpverse, but her personal style has already set her apart from the other MAGA women surrounding Donald Trump. The second lady has proven she's not taking glam tips from Melania Trump with her penchant for wearing natural-looking makeup and embracing her graying, shoulder-length hair. So far, she hasn't made the beauty and fashion mistakes we've seen Kimberly Guilfoyle and other Republican women frequently committing, such as overlining her eyes, overdoing the foundation, and wearing obvious hair extensions. Usha still hasn't quite consistently nailed dressing for the spotlight yet, having worn some outfits that missed the mark, but she's stayed away from leather looks (we're looking at you, Sarah Huckabee Sanders) and doesn't stick to only designer clothes, both of which we count as a win. However, there's one area where Usha still needs to put a lot of effort into: her shoe game.

Usha was photographed sporting senior citizen sneakers when they welcomed the Ohio State football team to the White House in April 2025 following their championship win. In photos shared by the second lady and the White House on Instagram, she looked almost too casually dressed in her chunky white sneakers as she posed next to her husband and members of the team, who all wore suits and dress shoes for the meeting. But she apparently loved the shoes so much that she even brought them along to Italy for their overseas tour. While she indeed looked comfortable, the outdated shoes knocked some serious points off her fashion grade. Unfortunately, the sneaker incidents were not the only moments that had us wishing she'd reached for a different shoe. Read on to see Usha Vance's footwear fails that were almost as bad as her senior citizen sneakers.

In April 2025, J.D. and Usha Vance headed to India, where the vice president met with the country's prime minister Narendra Modi. During their trip, Usha traded her senior citizen sneakers for an almost just as outdated pair of chunky white loafers for a visit to the Taj Mahal with their three kids, Ewan, Vivek, and Mirabel. The rest of her outfit wasn't bad, with Usha looking effortlessly elegant in the blue-and-white striped sleeveless dress and large flower earrings, but it's hard to look past her terrible shoe choice.

Based on her looks so far, Usha Vance's fashion mantra appears to be comfort over style, but we can think of at least 10 other shoe options that would be equally comfortable but much more stylish than the pointed-toe black kitten heels that she donned for a campaign event with her husband J.D. Vance in Racine, Wisconsin, in October 2024. The heels were so bad that J.D. practically looked like a style icon next to his wife in his navy suit, red tie, and shiny black dress shoes.

Usha Vance apparently has sneakers that don't fall under the chunky and white category, but we're not exactly celebrating. She paired a sleeveless black top and skinny jeans with bright red sneakers when she and J.D. Vance attended a college football game in North Carolina in September 2024 as part of their campaign. Her shoes are so eye-catching that it's the first thing you'd see in the photos from the outing, but we're not sure that's a good thing, considering the sneakers looked like something a younger Ronald McDonald would want to wear.

A simple sleeveless dress and brown flat sandals might be fine for a date or brunch, but this combo seems a little too casual to wear on the red carpet on the way to the stage where your husband will accept the Republican vice presidential nomination. Aside from being unsuitable for the RNC, the sandals themselves were nothing to write home about, so a pair of beige heels like the ones she was photographed wearing at a Nevada airport in July 2024 would have been a much better choice.

Usha Vance seemed much older than her 39 years in April 2025 when she was spotted with her family in Ramstein-Miesenbach, Germany, wearing an off-white cardigan, colorful pleated ankle-length skirt, and pointed-toe slingback white heels that looked like she had borrowed from her grandmother's closet. It might not have looked so old-fashioned had she been wearing a pair of flared jeans or suit pants, but the particular combination of clothing and shoes is giving a stylish 70-year-old rather than a fashionable millennial.

Usha Vance missed the mark yet again when she donned a dated-looking pair of black-and-gray ballet flats to accompany her husband, J.D. Vance, to a rally in Erie, Pennsylvania, in August 2024. While they're not nearly as bad as the white sneakers, we wouldn't be surprised if the flats, which she wore alongside a sleeveless gray top and high-waisted brown pants, were something she'd originally bought in the 2000s and just recently decided to wear.