Usha Vance reportedly thought Trump's role in inciting the insurrection at the Capitol was "deeply disturbing."Glen Stubbe/Minneapolis Star Tribune/ZUMA
Believe it or not, Usha Vance once had a view in common with the majority of Americans: she reportedly believed Trump was responsible for inciting the January 6, 2021, insurrection at the Capitol, and found it “deeply disturbing.”
That’s according to a Washington Post report published Saturday, based on interviews with more than two dozen of her friends, former co-workers and classmates. “Usha found the incursion on the Capitol and Trump’s role in it to be deeply disturbing,” one friend told the Post. Vance also registered to vote as a Democrat at least twice, according to the Post, and until this month worked as a litigator at a progressive San Francisco law firm.
The friend added to the Post: “She was generally appalled by Trump, from the moment of his first election.”
But then again, so was her husband, Trump’s newly-crowned running mate Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio). As Mother Jones has covered, J.D. Vance once called Trump “cultural heroin,” “reprehensible,” and “a cynical asshole…or America’s Hitler.” (On Facebook, according to the Post, Usha Vance praised her husband’s 2016 essay for the Atlantic, in which he called Trump “cultural heroin,” for publicly taking a “firm stand against Trump.”) Since then, though, he—and, apparently, his wife—have gone through something of a metamorphosis. J.D. Vance has called people arrested for their role in the insurrection “political prisoners.” And as my colleague David Corn reported this week, he also endorsed a book that praised the January 6 rioters and called progressives “unhuman.” (And as I reported, this is not the only book by a right-wing extremist that Vance has endorsed.)
Spokespeople for the Trump campaign and a representative for J.D. Vance did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Sunday afternoon about the Post‘s reporting on Usha Vance. But in a statement a spokesperson for J.D. Vance provided to the Post, Jai Chabria, a Republican strategist and family friend, said that Usha Vance “had a similar shift in views [to J.D.] and fully supports Donald Trump and her husband and will do whatever she can to ensure their victory this November.”
This spin—that the Vances’ apparent joint evolution on Trump is not hypocritical, but genuine—can have a real benefit for the Trump campaign, as my colleague Jacob Rosenberg wrote:
Trump wants to show people that liberals were bent out of shape, and he is not that bad. And when you get past the unnecessary yelling about Trump, his agenda is what America needs. To prove it? His running mate in 2024 is one of the people who was used to yell Trump was too dangerous the loudest.
Usha Vance’s apparent shift on Trump does not exist in a vacuum. There’s a long history of women supporting misogynistic men—including those they are married to—because it can help put them in proximity to power, or keep them there. (Consider, for example, the 53 percent of white women who voted for Trump in 2020.) Doing so, though, often requires sacrificing themselves.
“I’m not raring to change anything about our lives right now,” Usha Vance said in an interview with Fox and Friends before Trump named her husband as his running mate, “but I believe in J.D., and I really love him, and so we’ll just sort of see what happens with our life.”
