JD Vance is pretending to be very, very angry at Abdul El-Sayed for drawing his wife, Usha Vance, into our political debates. “Abdul, keep my wife’s name the hell out of your mouth,” Vance seethed while campaigning in Michigan this week for El-Sayed’s Senate opponent, Republican Mike Rogers.
Vance’s fake fury—he even called El-Sayed “very, very evil”—was ostensibly triggered by the Democrat’s recent claims about Vance’s marriage to Usha, who was born here to Indian immigrant parents. It made big news, with headlines faithfully amplifying Vance’s outrage as if it were genuinely felt, implying that he’d righteously struck back at an out-of-bounds slight.
The vice president’s pose as an enforcer of chivalry and rectitude in our politics is ludicrous on its face, given his apologetics for Donald Trump’s nonstop vicious personal smears. But this episode is of interest for another reason: El-Sayed’s stance articulates a bigger point about Vance’s craven compromises with the MAGA coalition’s racist and white nationalist elements that is 100 percent correct.
El-Sayed’s latest barb about Usha illustrates the point. It came after Vance attacked El-Sayed at a different rally last week, arguing that El-Sayed had “once argued that criticisms of Sharia law” are “rooted in white supremacy.” Vance then said this:
I’d love to go back in time and tell my Papaw that there is a man who claims to stand for working people—who says not only should we have Sharia law, but if you criticize it, you’re a white supremacist.
In saying these things, Vance is lying: He’s referring to some much-dissected 2022 comments from El-Sayed about white supremacy’s historic role in shaping U.S. politics and history. Those did refer to the plight of Native Americans, African Americans, Muslim-Americans and others, but didn’t say either of the things Vance claimed. Regardless, that Vance line is what prompted El-Sayed’s supposed transgression. In response to it, El-Sayed posted: “So do we think JD is taking Usha with him back in time to meet Papaw, or no.”
Note that Vance entered his family into the discussion here. He offered a revealing non-sequitur: His grandfather from the Kentucky mountains, this salt-of-the-earth Appalachian, would have seen El-Sayed’s discussion of the historic plight of nonwhites in America as anti-working people. Who does Vance mean by “working people”?
The question answers itself. Vance, by falsely claiming that El-Sayed would impose Sharia, is of course telling Michiganders that they should fear a Muslim Senate candidate by virtue of his religion. His Papaw would have been appalled; so too should today’s working-class voters, especially those who think of themselves, like Vance, as heritage Americans with roots in America’s white heartlands that reach back generations.
El-Sayed’s comment was a response to that. His claim is that if Vance’s Papaw would have seen a Muslim candidate in the bigoted terms that Vance articulated—as inherently posing a threat to “working people”—then he also might have seen Usha Vance in a similar way.
The key point is that El-Sayed is making an argument about JD Vance himself, not about his wife. 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.
That last bit is really critical here. Recall that some MAGA figures have attacked Vance’s marriage to Usha in heinously racist terms. And let’s not memory-hole this: Vance himself initially hesitated to condemn those attacks, almost certainly because it threatened the cohesion of the MAGA coalition. He ultimately did so after his passivity became untenable.
El-Sayed’s invocations of Usha, then, effectively ask Vance to reflect on his willingness to push anti-Muslim smears in the context of his own life experiences. This is an absolutely legitimate line of criticism. Because what El-Sayed is saying here is broadly correct: Vance’s successful rise in politics absolutely has required sordid compromises with factions in the MAGA coalition who are viciously bigoted, including toward his own wife, and this really should weigh more heavily on him.
One such vicious bigot, after all, is Donald J. Trump. The president of course hasn’t attacked Usha (there’s a separate story here about Trump-MAGA’s differing views of Hindus and Muslims, but that’s for another piece). Yet he has maliciously highlighted the hijab of El-Sayed’s wife and cast the El-Sayed family as alien others:
How dare El-Sayed “attack” JD Vance’s wife! What an outrage!! You’d think reporters would now ask Vance for his thoughts about Trump’s attacks on El-Sayed’s spouse, given his fury over El-Sayed’s highlighting of Usha. And Trump is hardly alone: El-Sayed and his family have faced a huge wave of anti-Muslim bigotry from MAGA.
Yet some in the media are playing dumb about many of these subtexts. Note, for instance, the New York Times write-up of all this: While it did report on the GOP’s hateful attacks on El-Sayed, it didn’t mention that his comment about Usha came in response to Vance’s bigoted monologue about his Papaw, El-Sayed, and Sharia. This bizarre omission made it sound as if El-Sayed volunteered the Usha line unprompted, making it seem more personal and draining it of its real meaning.
I don’t know how the politics of all this will play for El-Sayed. His approach is undoubtedly provocative. My suspicion is that Vance’s real goal here is to tie El-Sayed down in disputes that remind people of his Muslim heritage, on the theory that this can only hurt him.
Indeed, there may be no easy way to invoke Usha Vance that works politically for El-Sayed. Perhaps he needs to reach for a somewhat higher tone, a loftier register, to get these points across most effectively. One possibility might be for El-Sayed, who has two daughters, to say something like this: JD, every time Trump and MAGA attack my family’s religion and smear my wife for wearing a hijab, they are attacking your wife and kids, too.
That has the virtue of highlighting the truth: Vance has made vile accommodations with gutter white nationalists of all stripes. Given Vance’s undisguised desire to be seen as a towering moral and intellectual figure, you’d expect him to ruminate just a tad on how he and his movement are treating El-Sayed and his family. But in the end, he almost certainly won’t judge his white nationalist allies harshly for a fairly simple reason: He largely agrees with them.
