Far-right attacks target J.D. Vance’s wife Usha’s Indian heritage

Usha Vance, an attorney, is the daughter of Indian immigrants and a San Diego native. She met her husband, who is currently serving as the junior senator from Ohio, at Yale Law School. The two married in 2014 and have three children. On Wednesday, she introduced him to the world as the Republican nominee for vice president onstage at the Republican National Convention.

“When J.D. met me, he approached our differences with curiosity and enthusiasm,” Usha Vance said about her relationship with the Ohio senator. “He wanted to know everything about me, where I came from, what my life had been like.”

Usha Vance said that even though her husband is a “meat-and-potatoes kind of guy,” he “adapted to my vegetarian diet” — a line that appeared to draw some gasps from the convention floor. Her husband, she added, had even learned to cook Indian food from her mother. In his own remarks, J.D. Vance nodded to his wife’s heritage as he spoke about the United States’ tradition of allowing “newcomers into our American family.”

“We allow them on our terms. That’s the way we preserve the continuity of this project from 250 years past to hopefully 250 years in the future. And let me illustrate this with a story, if I may,” he said. “I am, of course, married to the daughter of South Asian immigrants to this country. Incredible people. People who genuinely have enriched this country in so many ways.”

But while J.D. Vance made clear that he is proud of his wife and her heritage, online, some far-right agitators and rushed to denigrate the couple, their mixed-race family and Usha Vance’s immigrant background.

The attacks highlight the tensions the vice-presidential nominee will have to navigate in a campaign where Trump has called for harsh anti-immigration measures and used violent rhetoric to describe migrants, including suggesting they be pitted in fights for entertainment.

After Vance was named Trump’s running mate, far-right activist Jaden McNeil on X shared an undated picture of the Vances and their newborn child on a post captioned: “I’m sure this guy is going to be great on immigration.”

In a podcast in which he attacked the Vances, Nick Fuentes, an avowed white supremacist, repeated rhetoric often associated with the racist “great replacement theory” — a line of argument popular among the right-wing, white nationalist fringe that falsely claims that there is a plan to “replace” native-born White Americans with immigrants. Fuentes — who is also known for making antisemitic remarks and who attended the deadly white nationalist rally in Charlottesville in 2017 — said he doesn’t expect “the guy who has an Indian wife” to “support White identity.”

“What exactly are we getting here? And that’s not a dig at him just because I’m a racist or something,” Fuentes said. “White people are being systematically replaced in America and in Europe through immigration and — to a much-lesser extent — due to intermarrying. This guy has a non-White wife.”

Fuentes — who visited Trump at Mar-a-Lago in November 2022 alongside rapper Ye — also made similarly inflammatory comments about the Vances on X.

A spokesman for J.D. Vance did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

In his best-selling memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy,” J.D. Vance wrote that he fell for his wife in their first year of law school and that she “seemed some sort of genetic anomaly, a combination of every positive quality a human should have: bright, hard-working, tall, and beautiful.”

Usha Vance, he said, was his “Yale spirit guide” who “instinctively understood the questions I didn’t even know to ask and she always encouraged me to seek opportunities that I didn’t know existed.” Usha Vance was on his side as he ran for Senate in 2022 — and as he espoused more right-wing, inflammatory rhetoric on the campaign trail, like Trump.

As a Senate nominee, Vance appeared to echo some of the rhetoric behind the “great replacement theory” when he claimed in an interview with Tucker Carlson that Democrats were hoping to win the 2022 election by replacing American voters and bringing in “a large number of new voters to replace the voters that are already here.”

He didn’t acknowledge that becoming a citizen — which is necessary to vote — is a lengthy process and that any new immigrant who was allowed to vote in the 2022 election had likely spent years working on their citizenship process.

American University professor Brian Hughes, who studies extremism and radicalization, said these extremists’ attacks on the Vances show that “anti-immigrant rhetoric and very standard White supremacist ideology frequently overlap.” Hughes said McNeil’s post questioning J.D. Vance’s views on immigration because of the makeup of his family is “a dog whistle towards White nationalism” and the “idea that the United States is and should be an exclusively White country.”

Still, he noted that views like those espoused by these extremists “are marginal voices within the broader far right.”

“That’s where these attacks will continue to come from,” he said. “I think that the vast majority of people in the American conservative movement don’t feel this way. And I think that’s to their credit.”

Ohio state Sen. Niraj Antani (R), the first Indian American state senator in Ohio history, pushed back on the notion that Fuentes, McNeil and other far-right agitators who have attacked the Vances represent any faction of the GOP. The two, he said, are “attention-seeking hate mongers,” and Fuentes, Antani noted, is a known antisemite who is “extremely racist and bigoted.”

“Being racist is not partisan, it’s not on the partisan spectrum,” Antani said. “I don’t think, you know, [Fuentes’s] comments are a reflection of any mainstream position. I think this is an extremely small, loudmouth racist.”

Antani, who is serving as a delegate at the Republican National Convention and who has been supportive of Vance’s vice-presidential nomination, also noted that Trump’s wife, Melania, is an immigrant. He added that the fact that the country could have an immigrant as first lady and the daughter of immigrants as a second lady is a “testament to the greatness of America.” If Republicans win in November, Usha Vance would be the first non-White second lady.

But some Republicans celebrated Usha Vance after her husband was named Trump’s running mate. Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.), a hard-line conservative, praised her in a post on X as “extremely impressive.”

“Mom of 3, met JD at Yale Law School, degrees from Yale and Cambridge, corporate litigator, clerked for Supreme Court justices,” Luna wrote.