Second Lady Usha Vance answered a Democratic Senate candidate who had dragged her into a fight over Sharia law by invoking her husband’s late grandfather. She told a story about his Ohio family. There was no outrage in it. In a preview clip posted August 25, 2026, ahead of her full “Fox & Friends” interview, Usha answered a weekend jab that Republicans and conservative commentators denounced as racist. It had come from Abdul El-Sayed, Michigan’s Democratic nominee for the Senate.
El-Sayed posted on August 22, a day after Vice President JD Vance attacked him over remarks he made in 2022 about Sharia law. James Vance — the grandfather JD Vance calls “Papaw” — would have found such a practice alien, the nominee suggested. “So do we think JD is taking Usha with him back in time to meet Papaw, or no…” El-Sayed wrote, in what appeared to be a reference to the second lady’s Indian ethnicity. He had previously referred to the couple’s biracial children as “brown kids” while arguing that the vice president’s positions were inconsistent with his own family’s background.
A Laugh, Then a Family Story
“I have to admit, I kind of laughed,” she said of the post. She had indeed never met her husband’s mamaw and papaw, Usha acknowledged — James and Bonnie Vance, who died in 1997 and 2005, respectively, years before she and JD Vance met at Yale Law School.
The children that couple raised — her husband’s mother, aunt and uncle — are people she knows and loves, she said, and each of them has shown her nothing but affection; JD’s aunt, she said, has served almost as a second mother to her. Parents who raised children like that must have been loving people themselves, she said, adding that she would have liked very much to meet them.
His Mother Speaks Up
The vice president’s mother, Beverly Vance Aikins, defended her daughter-in-law and her grandchildren in an interview with commentator Tomi Lahren on the podcast “Tomi Lahren Is Fearless,” released Sept. 2, with a segment published by OutKick on Sunday, Sept. 6. Of El-Sayed’s remarks, Aikins said: “Those are my babies. I love those babies and would do anything for any of them.”
Of the second lady, she told Lahren: “I love Usha as if she were my own daughter. She’s one of the best, most genuine people I’ve ever met. And she loves my son, and she’s a good mother.” She added, “She’s very humble,” and “I think she’s one of the nicest people I’ve ever met.”
Her Unexpected Welcome in Ohio
Until she began dating her future husband, Usha said, she had never set foot in Ohio, a state that upended the assumptions she brought with her. The state is culturally diverse, she said, and the people there have treated her as one of their own, welcoming and loving her.
Motherhood, literacy and life with a sitting vice president all come up in the interview, but her calm reply is likely to shape the coverage of it. Other clips from the sit-down touch on reading, a focus of hers, and on the best advice she has given her husband. When the full interview aired August 26 on “Fox & Friends,” Usha said: “Because yes, I never met JD’s Mamaw and Papaw. But 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.”
A Fight That Started Over Sharia Law
Behind the clash is an argument the vice president has been pressing: that the Democratic Party has drifted from the voters who once formed its base. He was in Middletown, Ohio, on August 21, campaigning at the Middletown Works plant — Armco Steel when his grandfather worked there, and owned by Cleveland-Cliffs since 2020 — when he held up a 2022 remark in which El-Sayed tied Oklahoma’s ban on Sharia law to white supremacy, offering it as evidence that Democrats have abandoned their working-class roots.
He built the case out of his own family. For 40 years his grandfather worked as a welder, and he voted Democratic because he considered it the party of union men, the vice president said. If a trip back in time were possible, JD Vance said, his message to his papaw would be that a man now claiming to speak for working people “says not only should we have Sharia law, but if you criticize it, you’re a white supremacist” — and that his grandfather’s party is not this one. El-Sayed’s campaign says he opposes any effort to write religious law into American law and that he was talking in 2022 about preemptive state bans, not about critics generally. By his grandson’s account, the elder Vance was a stabilizing and influential presence during his childhood.
Republicans Amplify the Backlash
Over the weekend, Republicans seized on the post — and on a second one El-Sayed aimed the same day at Natalie Harp, a longtime Trump aide. Rep. Brandon Gill, R-Texas, who identified the nominee by his full name, Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed, asked why he would assume that all white Midwestern grandparents are racist. Conservative media carried the line, and the exchange stayed alive into the week. Indian community leaders also criticized El-Sayed over the remark, according to an opinion column dated Sept. 4.
El-Sayed publicly defended his post in an August 22 interview with MS NOW. “The confusing thing about it is that he thinks that there are some people who are more American than others because they can point to their Papaw who was here earlier,” he said of JD Vance. He added: “Why is it then, how do you look your parents-in-law in the eye and say that somehow they’re less American than you are? Because that’s what he’s implying there.”
JD Vance Escalates in Michigan
The vice president took the feud directly to El-Sayed’s home state at a MAGA Inc. rally in Sterling Heights, Michigan, on Monday, telling the crowd: “Keep my wife’s name the hell out of your mouth, because she’s way out of your league.” He called the nominee “very, very evil” and faulted what he termed a “weird habit of talking about my family.”
The story kept its foothold on the program that carried the second lady’s interview. On Sept. 1, “Fox & Friends” aired a segment in which contributor Mary Katharine Ham analyzed the political backlash to El-Sayed’s post and what it could mean for the Michigan Senate race.
Questions about his record, meanwhile, keep coming. Pressed on Sharia law during an August 24 appearance on Fox News’ “Jesse Watters Primetime,” El-Sayed said nobody was trying to impose it on anyone, and he defended his proposed wealth tax on fortunes above $100 million. His denial that he is a socialist — made in July on MS NOW — drew public skepticism from Michigan state Rep. Bill G. Schuette, who argued that his policy platform tells a different story.
USA TODAY columnist Ingrid Jacques took up the post in an August 27 column headlined “Usha Vance isn’t a victim or a hostage. She’s doing just fine.” “Sounds both racist and sexist to me, and El-Sayed is getting hammered online for it, as he should be,” Jacques wrote, arguing that the implication was “that the second lady is trapped in a racist family she has no power to leave.”
Personal attacks have already defined the Michigan Senate race, and the vice president’s involvement — he has made El-Sayed a foil in his own campaign travel — has pulled a national audience into what is a state-level fight. The second lady rarely engages in that arena; her reply signaled she is willing to answer when the attack lands on her, and the rest of the Vance family has since joined in.
