Usha Vance is Just a Bit Conflicted

 

It continues to amaze me how many extremely smart, extremely well-educated people are engaged in trying to take this country down.

I marvel at the bent natures of people who are able to absorb lavish intellectual inputs, then use them for mephistophelian purposes.

Ted Cruz (Princeton, Harvard Law) comes immediately to mind. So does Josh Hawley (Stanford, Yale Law), Ron DiSantis (Yale, Harvard Law), Rand Paul (Baylor, Duke Medical), and Elise Stefanik (Harvard). John Neely Kennedy, the aw-shucks cornpone senator from Louisiana? He went to Vanderbilt and Oxford. The list goes on.

What they all have in common is that they’re Republican — no surprise there — and that they’ve all taken that expensive learning and rejected, as inconvenient, any components that pertain to truth, justice, or compassion.

These (mostly) white men constitute the elitest of the elite, yet they currently make their livings heaping scorn on “the elites,” and they do it with a straight face. Impervious to irony, they are fully engaged in bending reality to fit the nonsensical talking points they need to further gull their gullible base.

What sort of mental gymnastics do you have to perform? How do you convince yourself that what you know to be perfectly wrong is, on further review, perfectly right? And vice versa. How do you use all that brainpower to promote deceit and rationalize cruelty? And what sort of brainpower goes into signing on with an idiot like Donald Trump?

We can understand, if not excuse, Trump’s troglodyte base, people who were brought up stupid, ignorant, and mean. Critical thinking skills have no place in the MAGA cult, where under-education is a badge of honor.

But to have an advanced degree, to possess really good critical thinking skills, and yet still be seduced by the dark side is another order of weird.

Which brings us to the strange case of Usha Vance, wife of the besieged JD Vance (Ohio State, Yale Law). Arguably the most fascinating of the four spouses at the top of the presidential ticket, Usha is the super-brainy, hyper-ambitious product of Yale, Cambridge, Yale Law, several prestigious judicial clerkships, and a major corporate law firm.

Once a registered Democrat, she was once openly contemptuous of Trump and all he stood for. The daughter of Indian immigrants, she’s a practicing Hindu, making her the kind of person, in other words, any MAGA loon could hate. And yet, her husband is Trump’s running mate.

This is someone who brings new meaning to the word ‘conflicted.’

The visual alone is striking. A woman who is several shades darker than her husband wouldn’t even raise an eyebrow in any city in America. A woman of Indian descent would feel right at home in the Democratic Party — we’re running one for president, as it happens. But in today’s GOP — where white makes right, where Christianity is the only acceptable belief, and where ‘immigrant’ is four-letter word — Usha is a walking provocation.

This has not escaped the attention of bigoted imbeciles like Nick Fuentes, who is neither subtle nor unique in his disgust:

“Who is this guy, really? Do we really expect that the guy who has an Indian wife and named their kid Vivek is going to support white identity?”

This puts JD in the awkward, but not unexpected, position of defending his wife against a MAGA base that would just as soon burn her at the stake, while simultaneously tending to his own white identity.

Usha was, until her husband’s anointment three weeks ago, a successful corporate litigator at a top San Francisco law firm, known for its progressive policies. Munger, Tolles & Olson prides itself on its commitment to D.E.I. — diversity, equity, and inclusion — which sets MAGA’s hair on fire. Indeed, Munger markets itself to prospective clients — as well as to law school graduates it might want to hire — by touting its stellar “diversity numbers” as part of its sales pitch.

And while it’s true that she clerked for Brett Kavanagh and John Roberts before joining Munger, there is every reason to believe that she was unequivocal in her embrace of the Munger culture, an ethos that flies in the face of everything today’s Christo-fascist, white-supremacist Trump supporter stands for.

So when her husband glibly castigates “San Francisco liberals” like Kamala Harris and, incredibly, Tim Walz — who’d never set foot in the Bay Area in his life — the irony is almost surreal.

It’s not just that Usha was a high-powered San Francisco lawyer, it’s also that JD himself was a high-powered San Francisco venture capitalist, mentored and sponsored by Peter Thiel, the poster boy for deep pockets and shallow thinking.

While the GOP is desperate to find something, anything, they can use to throw shade on the incandescent Harris-Walz ticket, they must surely know that the San Francisco thing is not playing well, not even in Peoria.

Meanwhile, Usha is in a position at least as awkward as JD’s. While she’s plainly not happy in front of a camera, ducking the media is not an option. So she’s stuck defending the deranged drivel that regularly spews from her own husband’s mouth.

For someone with her smarts, this over-the-top hypocrisy can’t be easy to swallow, let alone defend. But there she was on Fox and CNN, dutifully side-stepping questions about childless cat ladies and the sex habits of sofas.

As for the couple’s past loathing of Trump — and JD’s famously strident condemnation of him — she now tells the world that she has “grown to understand Trump since then.” She doesn’t explain what she now understands.

But while she comes across as poised, articulate, and determined to stand by her man, she clearly has no taste for the crazy word salads that now define Republican discourse.

Okay, I get it. This is a seriously ambitious power couple. Any core principles they may once have held were checked at the door on that day, two years ago, when JD decided to run for the Senate as a Republican, the party where core principles go to die.

Still, you have to wonder about the pillow talk. Do they discuss, or even practice, the repertoire of lies, deflections, obfuscations, and disingenuous bullshit that pass for public policy in today’s GOP?

Do they hate themselves for it, or do they ride with it? Do they grudgingly tolerate the inside-out logic, or do they help create it? Does living with so many lies hurt their relationship, or make it more exciting?

It can’t be easy to lower yourself to Trump’s level. You need to keep a robust set of lies ready at all times. You need to hold beliefs that conflict with your own sense of right and wrong. You need to willingly submit to the depraved ambitions of a depraved party.

Is this where Usha Vance’s meticulously educated life has led her? Will she really be comfortable in a world of nonstop cognitive dissonance?

Or will Trump, being Trump, just use her up and throw her out? Stay tuned.