A fissure within the conservative MAGA movement over white supremacist figure Nick Fuentes has led to Vice President JD Vance defending his wife against racist attacks.
Fuentes, a controversial conservative live streamer, called Second Lady Usha Vance, who is Indian, a “jeet”–an anti-Asian slur–and called Vice President Vance a “race traitor.”
When asked about comments made about his wife from Fuentes and others on the political far-right, Vance told UnHerd that they “can eat s–t.”
“Antisemitism, and all forms of ethnic hatred have no place in the conservative movement. Whether you’re attacking somebody because they’re white or because they’re Black or because they’re Jewish, I think it’s disgusting,” said the Vice President, who recently made waves for calling U.S. Rep. Jasmine Crockett a “street girl” and declaring that thanks to the Trump-Vance Administration, “You don’t have to apologize for being white anymore.”
Vice President Vance also dismissed Nick Fuentes’s perceived influence in the Trump Administration and a “host of institutions on the right,” which he said is “vastly overstated.”
“Frankly, it’s overstated by people who want to avoid having a foreign-policy conversation about America’s relationship with Israel,” said Vance, referring to views by Fuentes and other far-right figures who vehemently oppose Israel and use that opposition to support antisemitic views. A growing rift within the political right movement recently exacerbated after former Fox News host Tucker Carlson interviewed Fuentes, who has become an ideological outcast of the Republican Party.
Vance has emerged as a complicated figure within the MAGA movement. Before becoming President Donald Trump’s second Vice President, Vance, in 2016, opposed Trump and said an “element of Donald Trump’s support that has its basis in racism.” The author of the white rural classic “Hillbilly Elegy” told CNN, “Race is definitely a part of the Trump phenomenon.”
By the time Vance ran for U.S. Senate in 2022, he was a MAGA convert and has since, like Trump, been accused of aligning his politics with the white nationalist movement. As a U.S. Senator, Vance introduced anti-DEI legislation before it became a principal agenda of the second Trump Administration, and once praised a conservative book that calls for the repeal of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. During the 2024 election, Vance notably spread the false and racist rumors that Haitian immigrants in Ohio were eating cats and dogs.
“JD Vance has an Indian wife, and he has biracial children, and he’s the poster boy for white supremacy, for how white people are so oppressed?” said Reecie Colbert, a political analyst and host of Sirius XM’s “The Reecie Colbert Show,” told theGrio. “He’s hoping, I think, to distract people from the fact that he does not have that pure white family that MAGA really wants to see.”
She added, “They won’t actually pay attention to how this Ivy League-educated former San Francisco elite has conned them into thinking that he’s still the guy in ‘Hillbilly Elegy.'”
