JD Vance and his wife really seem to loathe each other.
Last month, Megan McCain hosted Usha Vance for what should have been the softest of softball interviews, focused on what life as second lady is like. Vance clearly understood her assignment was to make it all seem like a great time — that leaving her career as a high-powered attorney to spend her days doing sub-Melania Trump public appearances about dull topics like the importance of reading for kids. But her acting chops weren’t up to it. Instead, audiences were treated to a one-hour hostage video, as the increasingly desperate McCain tried to get Vance to feign interest in her own life.
The longer Vance talked, the more miserable she seemed. Despite McCain’s best efforts to talk up how “excited” she is to see a “modern” woman in the role of second lady, Vance ended up talking about how much she missed her old life. “In a dream world, eventually, I’ll be able to live in my home and continue my career,” Vance told McCain, shrugging off questions about whether she wants to be first lady.
McCain also tried to extract sentimental details about the passionate romance between the Vances, for her audience to coo over. Usha Vance wouldn’t — or perhaps couldn’t — deliver, instead speaking of her husband like he was assigned as her roommate.
J.D. Vance has spent years now dropping similarly miserable hints that he is not enjoying married life. He runs down Usha Vance all the time in public. In March, he “joked” that when “the cameras are all on; anything I say, no matter how crazy, my wife Usha has to smile, laugh, and celebrate it.” At Trump’s birthday parade in June, he wished both the president and the Army a happy birthday without caveat. Then he added, “I would get in trouble if I didn’t mention it’s also my wedding anniversary.” But the most disturbing example, to me at least, is how he used his speech at last year’s Republican National Convention to celebrate how he is erasing her very identity in marrying her.
It’s also telling that J.D. Vance seems to think marriage and parenthood should be mandatory for nearly everyone. He speaks of these choices so often in terms of duty — as if he can’t imagine either being undertaken out of joy. A mere seven years into his marriage, Vance argued people should be “doggedly determined to stick it out” in marriage, no matter if it’s “unhappy” or even “violent.” Despite his claims that “childless cat ladies” are “miserable,” it’s hard not to notice the protest-too-much quality to his obsession with single or childless people.
As liberal commentator Melissa Ryan wrote during the campaign, when he calls other people “miserable,” you get the sense Vance is projecting. Despite his insistence that marriage and parenthood should be nearly universal, he talks about his own family with a sense of distance. He often refers to his kids as if they belong only to his wife. “She’s got three kids,” he said, laughing, during a 2024 interview in which he also admitted that, even though she’s not even Catholic, Usha Vance has his wife has “more responsibility to keep the kids quiet in the church.”
What the Vances show in public is hard to stomach. If that’s what the right thinks marriage is all about, J.D. Vance shouldn’t be so surprised that ever larger numbers of women are saying, “Thanks, I’ll choose cats instead.”
https://www.salon.com/2025/08/11/divorce...eady-usha/
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