Sleeping with the Enemy: Is Usha Vance a Hypocrite or a Survivor?

She is likely going along to get along in order to maintain her marriage, a fish out of water who has become a fellow traveler in her husband’s hypocrisy.

c/o Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call

Usha Vance attracts considerable attention from the media, not so much for her role as Second Lady, wife of the man who is a heartbeat from the presidency, but for her journey, along with her husband, from Never Trumpers to MAGA courtiers. While J.D. is transparent in his meretriciousness, his wife is a cipher. He is clearly comfortable in his hypocrisy; she, on the other hand, I suspect, is deeply conflicted. One wonders how much sleep she loses as she agonizes over her choice. As a highly public figure, she is fair game for examination.

There are basically two categories of members of the Trump court: true believers and opportunists. In the former count the likes of Stephen Miller, Pam Bondi, Kristi Noem, Pete Hegseth and Kash Patel — all unflinching MAGA sturmbannführers in the quest to exterminate democracy once and for all and make Donald Trump America’s first unquestioned, all-powerful (not to mention octogenarian) dictator. In the latter category find Elise Stefanik, Lindsey Graham, Scott Bessent, Marco Rubio and J.D. Vance among others — shapeshifting, power-lusting climbers who hawk their souls on Ebay to the highest bidder. There are gradations, of course, from cosplaying fanatic to pathetic apologist.

J.D. Vance’s transformation is brazenly cynical and Faustian. Once a self-described Never Trumper, he publicly denounced Trump as “reprehensible,” “cultural heroin” and potentially “America’s Hitler,” having told NPR in 2016: “I think that I’m going to vote third party because I can’t stomach Trump. I think that he’s noxious and is leading the white working class to a very dark place.” But there’s nothing like a cool $15 million from a MAGA billionaire and the chance to become U.S. vice president to get one to fork over one’s soul. It’s a morality tale as old as time itself. And then there are their spouses and loved ones. How do they adjust?

In the latest Usha deep dive, the New York Times writes,

Less than a year ago, Usha Vance, onetime Democrat and the daughter of immigrants, was living a radically different life as a litigator for a progressive law firm while raising her children in Ohio. Many old friends are bewildered by her transformation. She may be the wife of the vice president, they say, but she must be appalled by the Trump administration’s attacks on academia, law firms, judges, diversity programs and immigrants.

The NYT adds, “Ms. Vance has largely stayed out of the fray over the administration’s political and policy agenda, even as her husband has continued to be a polarizing figure.” (BTW, these days, Usha asks folks to address her as “Mrs. Vance” and not “Ms.” — a concession to MAGA retro-culture.)

In the “Comments,” readers speculate that:

“The clear explanation, based on the sum total of her behavior and allegiances over the course of her life, is that her politics and morality are variables that change to adapt pragmatically to her environment.”

“Either she is classy on the outside and not so charming in the inside… Or - perhaps more likely - she is balancing an enormous level of cognitive dissonance in order to maintain loyalty to her husband and keep this ship afloat. If so, eventually the effort of balancing and concealing it will break her.”

“People can have different opinions when looking at the same set of facts, but embracing Trumpism is a bridge too far for someone who was once a liberal lawyer who once wrote for the Yale Law Review. Trumpism espouses lawlessness and seeks to overturn valid democratic elections. You have to lose your moral compass to embrace such a view. Either that, or be so cynical that you only care about your own ambition and that of your family.”

“I am certain that she is sufficiently well versed in history to know that association with a regime this celebratory of cruelty, law breaking, and corruption, can never be classified as ‘glamorous,’ and that being a family member of one of its high command will never be judged apart from the stench of its brutality.”

Until her husband threw his lot in with Donald Trump, the evidence shows that she, like he, could be described as a political moderate, in her case on the center-left. Usha was previously registered as a Democrat. The daughter of university-educated immigrants from India who settled in California, Usha, the definitive overachiever, holds B.A. and J.D. degrees from Yale, where she and J.D. met, and a master’s from the UK’s Cambridge University. Up until her husband’s run for vice president, she worked for a San Francisco law firm whose website describes its corporate culture as “radically progressive” and committed to DEI. A Cambridge classmate described their circle of friends as “left of center, with Marxists well represented.” Some employees at her old law firm expressed to the New York Times their confusion and disappointment at Usha’s support of her husband’s Trumpian turn and his rants on gender and immigration.

One has to wonder the reaction of her parents to her husband’s disgraceful parroting of Trump’s vicious lies about immigrants and attacks on universities. “We have to honestly and aggressively attack the universities in this country,” said J.D., whose mother-in-law is a college provost at the University of California San Diego. “The universities do not pursue knowledge and truth,” he added. “They pursue deceit and lies.” This by an Ivy Leaguer married to an Ivy Leaguer.

I find no political screeds or defenses on her part, indicating to me that, unlike her husband, Usha is carefully and quietly trying to set herself apart from the madness and mendacity of MAGA. Her one stumble was allowing herself to be dragooned onto joining J.D. on a quick ill-conceived visit to Greenland clearly aimed to piss-mark the island, wolf-like, to satisfy Trump’s insane quest for eastward manifest destiny. Usha’s ingenuously cheery remarks to Greenlanders came off as silly and doubly offensive. She was being used by the Trumpers and ought to feel embarrassed by it.

I, for one, feel sorry for Usha Vance. She is a non-Christian, highly educated professional, a woman of color with biracial children, offspring of immigrants, who has been thrown into a milieu of coarse, anti-intellectual, xenophobic, misogynist race-baiters — diametrically opposite from her former circle of brainy and cosmopolitan progressives. My guess is that she is going along to get along in order to maintain her marriage, a fish out of water who has become, against her better judgment, a fellow traveler in her husband’s hypocrisy. Were I she, I would be feeling very, very alone now. And one can imagine the tense private discussions she has with her parents. Another thing I like to point out is what will the Vance’s tell their children about their role in what historians will clearly describe as America’s most corrupt, anti-democratic, anti-American values administration? Having served such a system is like having an indelible pirate’s tattoo on one’s reputation.

When Tracy Chapman’s song, “All That You Have is Your Soul,” happens to play on the radio or in some public venue, it must give Usha Vance pause.

Don’t be tempted by the shiny apple,
Don’t you eat of a bitter fruit,
Hunger only for a taste of justice,
Hunger only for a world of truth,
’Cause all that you have is your soul.

Or not.