Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) defended his wife from attacks on her Indian roots as the 2024 presidential campaign heats up.
During an interview with CBS's Face the Nation, the Ohio senator said he wished his wife's critics would “just keep their mouth shut, or at least focus on me." Usha Vance has faced backlash from white supremacists after former President Donald Trump tapped her husband to be his running mate.
“She's way out of their league,” Vance told CBS host Margaret Brennan on Sunday. “I get pissed off sometimes,” Trump’s running mate added, "when people attack your family … for something that no person can control."
Usha Chilukuri was born to parents who immigrated to the United States from India in the late 1970s. She married Vance in 2014, and they have three children together. While her husband is a practicing Catholic, Usha Vance holds to her Hindu faith and has been on the receiving end of attacks on her Indian heritage as she stumps for Trump’s campaign.
“J.D. Vance also has a non-white wife, an Indian wife, and a kid named Vivek,” white supremacist and political activist Nick Fuentes warned in July. “All his kids have Indian names, so it’s like, what exactly are we getting here? And that’s not a dig at him just because I’m a racist or something. But 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?” Fuentes said.
In 2022, Trump sparked outrage after it was revealed that he met with Fuentes at his Mar-a-Lago resort. The former president said he had planned to meet only with rapper Kanye West, who brought along the uninvited Fuentes.
"Kanye West very much wanted to visit Mar-a-Lago," Trump said at the time. "Our dinner meeting was intended to be Kanye and me only, but he arrived with a guest whom I had never met and knew nothing about."
Vance responded to concerns about Trump's meeting with Fuentes during an ABC interview on Sunday.
"Donald Trump doesn't know anything about him and frankly doesn't care," he said. "The one thing I like about Donald Trump is that he actually will talk to anybody, but just because you talk to somebody doesn't mean you endorse their views."
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Vance said he believes the attacks on his Indian American wife are “going to follow us wherever we go because that's the nature of public life in America.”
“It's disgraceful," Vance said. "My attitude on this is [if] people want to attack me, attack my policy views, they're welcome to. I signed up for it. My wife didn't sign up for it.”
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