Usha Vance has perfect response to Abdul El-Sayed’s ‘racist’ attack on her and JD
WASHINGTON – Second Lady Usha Vance offered a classy response to controversial Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, who invoked her background to attack her husband, Vice President JD Vance.
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“I have to admit I kind of laughed,” she told Fox & Friends, adding she always felt comfortable with Vance’s relatives in Ohio.
El-Sayed lobbed the attack on Saturday after Vance criticized his adherence to Sharia law. El-Sayed suggested the practice would be completely alien to Vance’s grandfather, whom the vice president calls “Papaw.”
“So do we think JD is taking Usha with him back in time to meet Papaw, or no…” El-Sayed said, seemingly in reference to the second lady’s Indian ethnicity.
Usha Vance shrugged off the implication, giving a gracious response.
“Yes, I never met JD’s mamaw and papaw,” she told Fox News in an interview that will air in full on Wednesday’s Fox & Friends.
“I do know and love the children that they raised: his mom, his aunt and uncle. And they have never been anything but incredibly loving. His aunt is like a second mother to me. I have to think that, if they raised children like that, they would’ve been loving as well and I would have really, really, really loved to have met them,” she said in the interview.
The second lady said she had never been to Ohio before dating Vance and her expectations “were blown up.”
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“It’s a culturally diverse place,” she said. “The people have been so welcoming. Everyone has been so loving. They are my family. They treat me like their family.”
Vice President Vance, campaigning in Ohio earlier this week, pointed to the Michigan Senate nominee’s past remarks linking criticism of Sharia law to white supremacy as evidence that the party has abandoned its working-class roots.
He discussed his late grandfather, who worked as a welder for 40 years and voted Democrat because he believed it was “the party of union men.”
“I’d love to go back in time and tell my papa that there is a man who claims to stand for working people who says not only should we have Sharia law, but if you criticize it you’re a white supremacist. That’s not my grandpa’s Democratic Party,” Vance said.
Vance’s grandparents died years before he met Usha in 2010 when they were both students at Yale Law School. The vice president credited James Vance, his papaw, with being a stabilizing and influential figure in his life while growing up.
Republicans were quick to come to the Vances’ defense.
“Why does Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed just assume that all white Midwestern grandparents are racist?” asked Rep. Brandon Gill, R-Texas.
