Second Lady Usha Vance, who was the recently the eye of the storm over her Greenland visit, has spoken out about the attacks that she and Vice President JD Vance receive — and a majority of it stems from her Indian roots. “Do I think it’s great when people talk about ‘normalizing Indian hate’ or something like that? Absolutely not. I think it’s terrible,” Usha Vance said in an interview with The Free Press. ]
But Usha said these racist attacks are nothing new. “I think it’s our relationship to this information”—the technology, the screens, the social media—“that is potentially new.”
The recent India hate that surrounded JD ad Usha was DOGE staff Marko Elez, who made multiple racist posts in the past. “Normalize Indian hate,” one of his posts read. These racist posts got him fired from DOGE, but JD Vance was in favor of rehiring him, which drew ire from Indian-origin Democratic Rep Ro Khanna, who reminded JD Vance of that his kids share Indian origin because of Usha’s roots.
“Are you going to tell him (Marko Elez) to apologize for saying ‘Normalize Indian hate’ before this rehire? Just asking for the sake of both of our kids,” Ro Khanna took a jibe at JD which rattled the Vice President as he did not like his kids to be brought to the debate.
In the interview, Usha said she hadn’t seen the back-and-forth between JD Vance and Ro Khanna in its entirety. “There is nothing that he cares more about than how his children grow up and how he relates to them and how we live together as a family. And he is very, very, very concerned, as we both are and I think maybe anyone in our position would be, about how this life impacts them,” Usha said.
Usha Vance says she’s not from a wealthy MAGA background
The Second Lady said her highest priority right now is to be a normal person. “It’s a very strange life that we lead, where there are lots of people who have just imagined all sorts of narratives about us and what we think and what we do and why we do it and how much planning goes into it and all these sorts of things,” she said.
Usha said she has received a warm reception into the MAGA world though she is not from a wealthy background. “For what it’s worth, my reception into this world—and I’m not from a particularly wealthy background, not from a very fashion-oriented background personally or professionally—has been really positive,” she said. “People don’t seem to care all that much what I look like.”