What pisses me off about Usha Vance is that she’s not a stupid woman. She graduated from Yale Law (where she met her husband JD Vance), she clerked for Brett Kavanaugh (pre-SCOTUS) and John Roberts (when he was Chief Justice). She’s clearly been with the Republican program for a while, and perhaps some Republican powers-that-be considered Usha to be one of their little side-projects (sidenote: I’ve long believed that Amy Coney Barrett was also an indoctrinated side-project). Usha is an educated lawyer, a photogenic Indian-American woman, a daughter of immigrants, married to a rising star in Republican politics. Somewhere, there might have even been a plan for Usha to run for office and become the next Nikki Haley. But that plan is over, and a new plan has commenced.

So, what’s the new plan? Somehow turn Usha Vance into the kind of Republican wife who can be an asset to her husband and to the Trump campaign. I still say that Trump’s people did next to no vetting on the Vance family and that Donald Trump was probably as surprised as his white supremacist base that JD Vance is married to an Indian-American woman. But instead of hiding her away and pretending like she doesn’t exist to placate the white supremacists, Usha is giving interviews. They’re using her – hilariously – to whitewash and backtrack on her husband’s selective obsession with “childless cat ladies.” That section is around the 6-minute mark.

She’s rather girlish, right? I wonder if that’s an affectation. A very girlish voice, youthful mannerisms. She’s 38 and she carries herself like someone more than a decade younger. The notable part of the interview came when Usha was asked about her husband’s repeated comments about “childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable too.” He also said not having children “makes people more sociopathic” and he wants to “go to war” against childless people. But according to Usha, her husband was just talking about how hard it is to be a parent in America!

“I took a moment to look and actually see what he had said and tried to understand what the context was and all that, which is something that I really wish people would do a little bit more often. And the reality is, he made a quip in service of making a point that he wanted to make that was substantive and it had actual meaning. I just wish people sometimes would talk about those things and that we would spend a lot less time going through this three-word phrase or that three-word phrase because what he was really saying is that it can be really hard to be a parent in this country, and sometimes our policies are designed in a way that make it even harder. And we should be asking ourselves, why is that true? What is it about our leadership and the way they think about the world that makes it so hard for parents?”

Liar liar pantalones on fire. Again, JD Vance was not lamenting some imaginary policies which harm parents or families, other than the policies he wants to implement. Vance was fixated on women refusing to become breeders for the state. He equated childlessness with sociopathy. He projected his own misery as a parent onto childfree people.

When pressed about what she would say to the people who were hurt by her husband’s weird fixation with childfree people, Usha did a weird deflection and said “Well, I think I would say that… JD absolutely, at the time and today, would never, ever ever want to say something to someone who was trying to have a family and really struggling with that [and that’s] never, ever anything that anyone would want to mock or make fun of.” She then surprised me by acknowledging that some people simply don’t want to have kids, after which she then returned to her talking point, which is that her husband is some kind of hardcore advocate for parents (a lie).

Photos courtesy of Fox News, Cover Images, JD Vance’s IG.