It was a hug that sent a thousand divorce lawyer hearts a-flutter. At a recent Turning Point USA event in Mississippi, Vice President JD Vance and Erika Kirk reminded a nation why right-wing Christians used to favor the awkward side hug over full body contact. The vice president and widow of the recently assassinated Charlie Kirk got tongues wagging when, during an onstage embrace, she put her hand in his hair and he touched her hip, demonstrating a level of affection he doesn’t seem to have for his actual wife, Usha Vance. The gossip mill, both on and offline, exploded, with people speculating that Kirk and Vance are having an affair. The rumors were amplified by a comment Kirk made during the same event. “No one will ever replace my husband,” she said. “No, but I do see some similarities of my husband in JD.”
The wild speculation about the nature of their friendship is ironic when considering that both have built their careers by taking an intrusive, judgmental interest in dictating the personal lives of strangers. Vance has a long rap sheet of insulting women who don’t get married and have children according to his exacting timetable, calling them “miserable” and “cat ladies” who are destroying the nation with their alleged selfishness. Along with her late husband, Kirk has routinely prescribed that women forgo college degrees and careers — even though she has both — so they can fully commit to being submissive housewives.
The fevered rumors have exposed not a secret affair but a political liability: Vance’s marriage is an increasingly poor fit for his political brand, which has become increasingly based on praising the virtues of white supremacy and retrograde gender roles.
In Republican politics, especially in the MAGA era, a politician’s wife is an important part of establishing his reputation as a “real” man to a base who eschews thinking and nuance in favor of emotional reactions. Vance not only wants to be president, but he also has a well-financed machine backing him, and they will doubtless want a good return on their investment in his future. Based on the xenophobia and anti-South Asian sentiment that courses through the MAGA body politic, the vice president could be better marketed as President Donald Trump‘s successor if he had a wife who looked more like Erika Kirk.
This tension came to a head at the same event where Vance and Kirk shared their infamous hug. During a question-and-answer session, an audience member asked Vance how he navigates being married to Usha, who has not chosen to convert to his Catholic faith but instead maintains her Hindu religious heritage taught by her immigrant parents, while also identifying as agnostic. After triumphantly declaring that their three children are being raised as Christian, Vance admitted he wanted her to convert: “I believe in the Christian Gospel, and I hope eventually my wife comes to see it the same way.”
Vance has grown increasingly loud about his obvious embrace of blood-and-soil nationalism. While never coming right out and saying so, he’s made it clear that he sees the U.S. as a nation of and for white people.
The vice president’s comments set off a firestorm, and not just because of religion. Vance has grown increasingly loud about his obvious embrace of blood-and-soil nationalism. While never coming right out and saying so, he’s made it clear that he sees the U.S. as a nation of and for white people. In the same breath he expressed his hope for Usha Vance’s conversion, he praised the 1920s-era law that explicitly restricted immigration to preserve the country’s Anglo heritage. He’s defended Republican operatives who were caught texting “I love Hitler.” He recently argued that it’s “totally reasonable and acceptable” for Americans to expect next door neighbors to “speak the same language.”
The MAGA base may thrill to hear that such a minor annoyance justifies destroying the lives of millions of people. But it’s hard to square with Vance having a wife whose family immigrated from a country that now deserves, he has insinuated, being placed on a restricted immigration list.
When it comes to his wife’s religion, Vance said she has “free will” — an admission he made in his usual self-congratulatory tone. This view, though, is increasingly at odds with what the MAGA base wants from their leaders, especially the radicalized young men that Vance is doing his best to court — along with far-right authoritarians in Silicon Valley who have funded him every step of the way. Those circles are all about the “tradwife,” a view that women should not have autonomy but exist to submit to and serve their husbands. Even though Usha Vance left her career as a high-powered lawyer to be second lady, she hasn’t bothered to mask her discontent and her desire to return to the legal profession.
So yes: A hug and a couple of weird statements are don’t quite justify the widespread speculation that Vance wants to dump his wife to marry someone who better fits the “tradwife” model.
But the rumors reflect a much deeper reality that people are exactly right to perceive: Vance is a soulless striver who will sell off anything if he thought it would give him more power. We don’t have to ask if he would betray his wife and kids. He does so nearly every day by promoting a vision of America that has no room for them in it.
The gossip, though, is not advantageous at this moment for either Vance or Kirk, if only because it’s interfering with the larger MAGA effort to canonize Charlie Kirk as a fascist martyr whose murder they clearly hope can be used to justify endless atrocities. There’s already strong signs that Charlie Kirk is not shaping up to be the American version of a Horst Wessel, whose death in Germany at the hands of communists in 1930 allowed the Nazis to elevate him to martyrdom. The rumors about Vance and Kirk threaten to completely derail the already failing efforts to turn Charlie Kirk’s murder into a flashpoint from which our collapse into total fascism is inevitable.
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It’s terrible stuff, but at least we get to witness some darkly funny efforts by both Vance and Kirk to make these rumors go away. Vance used the only rhetorical skill he has: Fake umbrage. He called his critics “disgusting” and insisted on X, “I’ll continue to love and support [Usha] and talk to her about faith and life and everything else, because she’s my wife.” Tacking “because she’s my wife” onto the comment was not helpful, of course, because it only makes it sound like a duty and not a pleasure. The replies to his post were filled with scoffing.
Kirk has been hustling to put this to bed even harder, sitting down for a full hour with Jesse Watters on Fox News. “There were cameras all over my husband when he was murdered,” she complained. “There have been cameras all over my friends and family mourning. There have been cameras all over me analyzing my every move, analyzing my every smile, my every tear.”
This would be a sympathetic complaint if all the non-stop filming hadn’t been the express desire of both Charlie and Erika Kirk. His murder happened at an event he regularly staged on college campuses to generate clips for social media saturation. As the New York Times reported, Erika Kirk carefully stage-managed the days and weeks after her husband’s murder, making sure to photograph and publish every potentially cinematic moment of her grief. It’s why rubbing Vance’s head in public was so odd. This is a woman who knows her way around a camera, so it’s hard to imagine she would be unaware of what people would project with her highly unusual head-touching hug style.
Even Fox News pitched in on clean-up duty, giving Erika Kirk a newly minted “Charlie Kirk Legacy Award” during a televised event. But it’s doubtful any of this will work. Vance should know this. After all, he has seemed to take special pleasure in spreading ugly, unfounded rumors about people, such as defaming Haitian immigrants by claiming they eat people’s pets. He knows a dramatic story will defeat the boring truth any day, especially if it’s one people want to believe.
Everyone with two eyes can see he’s in a pickle, having burdened himself with a wife in his youth who quickly became unacceptable in the political fantasy he is trying to create, one that is increasingly indistinguishable from Nazi propaganda imagining a “homeland” populated only by strong-jawed Aryan men and their buxom blonde wives. If Vance doesn’t like these rumors about Erika Kirk, maybe he should pause to consider why they are just so easy for people to believe.
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