Usha Vance just wants to go home.
During a much-hyped appearance on Meghan McCain’s podcast Citizen McCain on Wednesday, the second lady expressed very little interest in taking over for Melania Trump, should 79-year-old Donald Trump either not make it through his term or pass the baton to her husband, Vice President JD Vance, in 2028.
“I’m not plotting out next steps or really trying for anything after this,” Vance said. When her husband’s time as VP is up, she added, “In a dream world, eventually I’ll be able to live in my home and kind of continue my career.”
Throughout the interview, the former lawyer exhibited the same quiet loyalty she has since her husband became Trump’s running mate, even in the face of such hard-hitting questions from McCain like “How do you incorporate good protein into being a vegetarian?” and “Are you interested in fashion?”
She did not, however, utter Trump’s name once in the hour-long conversation, allowing speculation about her personal opinions on her husband’s politics to grow.
Old friends of Usha’s told The New York Times that they were shocked by the one-time Democrat’s silent support of her husband’s anti-immigrant agenda and assumed she’d be “appalled by the Trump administration’s attacks on academia, law firms, judges, and diversity programs.”
The daughter of Indian immigrants and academics, Vance has been mum on the policies her husband helps Trump push, including his bid to end the birthright citizenship clause that solidified her own status in the U.S. after her parents migrated from India in the 1970s.
The second lady declined to be interviewed for the Times piece about her “new life in Trump’s Washington,” and the paper noted that more than a dozen old friends of hers would only speak on the condition of anonymity “out of fear of angering her.” That sentence speaks volumes, considering the cheerful, neutral image Vance has maintained and employed effectively with McCain on Wednesday.
JD Vance told supporters in March that his wife “has to smile and laugh and celebrate” after “anything that I say, no matter how crazy.”
Thus the burning questions about the second lady’s true opinions on her husband’s politics remain. McCain declined to ask her guest about the perception that she disagrees with her husband on policy. Instead, the “elephant in the room” she brought up near the very end of their mostly substance-free, hour-long talk was an anti-climatic question about whether Vance was “stressed” about possibly becoming first lady one day.
“My attitude is that this is a four-year period where I have a set of responsibilities to my family, to myself, to obviously the country,” Mrs. Vance said before explaining why she hopes to “eventually” live “in my home.” Earlier in the interview she told McCain, “We moved to what we called our dream house or our forever house” in Ohio before Vance was elected, “and it really is the place where I feel most at home.”
She did, however, express her “understanding” should she not be able to go back to that home any time soon.
“If that happens in four years, I understand. If that happens at some other point in the future, I understand,” she said placidly. “I’m just sort of along for the ride and enjoying it while I can. This is maybe truly the fun part.”
