JD Vance has done a lot of smarmy, cynical things in service of his insatiable ambition, but one of the grossest has to be the way he uses his wife, Usha Chilukuri Vance, to validate his carefully crafted, I’m-not-racist-just-folksy-and-realistic persona. It doesn’t need to be explicit to be loud; the little he’s said about his partner’s and in-laws’ backgrounds is enough to see he’s trying to cast himself as a decent guy who just happens to have decided that Donald Trump is the most reasonable candidate for president, rather than a craven opportunist who is dealing with the fact that he married someone who doesn’t quite fit the mold of nice white Republican wife. Vance is the latest proof that being married to a person of color doesn’t matter when you’re in bed with white supremacy.
Over the weekend, Vance appeared on The Megyn Kelly Show and said “Look, I love my wife so much. I love her because she’s who she is. Obviously, she’s not a white person, and we’ve been accused, attacked by some white supremacists over that. But I just, I love Usha.”
Vance invoking white supremacists here is a deliberate move to distance himself from them. He couldn’t possibly be a white supremacist—look at his wife! Look at his kids! Could a white supremacist love a brown woman?!
The answer is an obvious, resounding, and unequivocal yes. It’s the same mental gymnastics behind some of racism’s greatest hits, including “some of my best friends are Black” and “you’re one of the good ones.”
Not too long ago, Vance’s apparent disdain for the judgments of white supremacists may have been slightly more sincere, but his position on that has seemingly evolved. In less than a decade, he went from confiding his belief that Black people will suffer under a Trump presidency to mocking progressive claims of racism and promoting replacement theory in his first Senate campaign ad. Since running for Senate in 2022, Vance has jerked steadily to the right and become unrecognizable to people who knew him before. He has blamed the opioid epidemic on undocumented immigrants, and also said that all immigrants were making working and living conditions worse for native-born Americans. Last year he introduced a bill that would make English the official language of the United States. He jokes about being called a racist, implying that his critics on the left are overly preoccupied with race and identity to the detriment of literally everything else.
In fact, the Vances are a perfect example of one of the many masks white supremacy assumes in this country. This one presents multiculturalism as a self-evident protection against accusations of racism. Just to be clear, being a member of any kind of marginalized group does not absolve a person of their participation in and backing of white supremacist ideology and policy, and there are plenty of BIPOC Republicans in office to prove that. They will say that their politics are more than their skin color; that is true of all of us, but that is also a way to minimize the ways in which their identities don’t square with the policies they support. The tradition of Asian Americans being complicit in reinforcing racist model minority narratives is a close one to the Vances: Amy Chua, Asian mom of my nightmares and author of Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, was a mentor to both of them at Yale.
Usha Vance, who was registered as a Democrat as recently as 2014, is an ambitious and accomplished lawyer in her own right. She attended Yale undergrad, got a masters in philosophy at Cambridge, and then her J.D. at Yale Law School, where she met Vance. She clerked for Justice Brett Kavanaugh and Chief Justice John Roberts before taking a job as a trial lawyer. The whole time, she has supported Vance as he built his career and morphed into the gutless weenie now running for Vice President.
Proximity to power, even in the highest tiers of the Republican party, will not protect a woman of color from Trump’s racism; just look at former Trump cabinet member Elaine Chao, who Trump called Mitch McConnell’s “China-loving wife” and “Coco Chow.” Trump and his people will reach for the lowest-hanging fruit every time they aim to ridicule an opponent—or an ally—who crosses them.
At this point it doesn’t matter whether Vance truly believes what he says, what his relationship with his spouse is actually like, or what her politics are. It’s clear that these are two people who have built a marriage around one shared goal: acquiring as much power as possible by whatever means necessary.
