Vice President JD Vance's comments about his wife's religion raised questions about their relationship, but a columnist suggested the second lady might have doubts of her own.
The vice president expressed hopes that his wife Usha Vance, who was raised in a Hindu family, would convert to Christianity, and The Guardian's Arwa Mahdawi analyzed what those remarks mean about the couple.
"Usha Vance is a very clever woman with terrible taste in men," Mahdawi wrote. "The Yale and Cambridge-educated lawyer quit her job at a prestigious DC firm the same day her husband was picked to be Donald Trump’s running mate. She trailed after him on the campaign trail, smiling for the cameras. A former Democrat, she aligned herself with Trump, a man her husband once called 'America’s Hitler.'"
Her loyalty has earned the second lady a taxpayer-funded mansion and private jet trips around the globe, and while her husband has pushed back on what he calls "disgusting" racist attacks on his Indian-American wife, Mahdawi argued that Vance has not directly condemned the white supremacists who've lobbed them.
"You know what seems disgusting, JD: saying that you hope the woman you married in a Christian-Hindu ceremony abandons something apparently important to her," Mahdawi wrote.
But she argued that Usha Vance is no victim and has played a major role in her husband's political rise from "Hillbilly Elegy" memoirist to U.S. senator to one heartbeat away from the presidency.
"She’s just as implicated in America’s slide towards autocracy and embrace of bigotry as he is," Mahdawi wrote. "Still, you have to wonder if she has moments of doubt. Especially as she hasn’t fully Maga-fied herself yet: unlike many in Trump’s orbit, she hasn’t succumbed to the conspicuous cosmetic surgery known as Mar-a-Lago face."
The 39-year-old told a right-wing correspondent earlier this year that she didn't plan on dying her naturally graying hair, saying "people don't seem to care" what she looks like, but Mahdawi shamed her support for her husband's about-face on President Donald Trump.
"I’ll tell you what you look like to me, Usha: a woman happy to trade her dignity for power," she wrote.