New Delhi: United States Vice President JD Vance borrowed a line from the 2022 Oscars while responding to Michigan Democratic Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed.
“Whatever you want to talk about, Abdul, keep my wife’s name the hell out of your mouth, because she’s way out of your league,” Vance said, responding to El-Sayed’s recent social media posts and comments about the Vice President’s family and marriage.
The remark echoed Will Smith’s post-slap warning to Rock after he joked about his wife, Jada Pinkett Smith. Vance adapted the line for the political stage, adding that El-Sayed has a “weird habit of talking about my family.” He emphasised that he would never “disrespect somebody’s family by talking about another person’s wife, a person who isn’t on the ballot.”
The Feud
Vance has previously criticised El-Sayed’s past comments on efforts to ban consideration of Sharia law, saying he would “love to go back in time and tell my Papaw” (his late grandfather) that a man claiming to stand for working people argued that criticising Sharia made one a white supremacist.
“That’s not my grandpa’s Democratic Party,” Vance said. El-Sayed responded with a post on X by asking, “So do we think JD is taking Usha with him back in time to meet Papaw, or no…” The comment has been interpreted as referencing Usha Vance’s Indian heritage and Hindu background and implying Vance’s Appalachian grandfather might not have approved of the interracial marriage.
Usha Vance later addressed the latest jibe on Fox & Friends, saying she “kind of laughed” and noting that while she never met her husband’s late grandparents, the relatives who raised him have treated her with warmth.
“His mom, his aunt and uncle—they have never been anything but incredibly loving. They are my family. They treat me like their family,” she said.
In his 2016 memoir Hillbilly Elegy, Vance himself wrote that one of his great regrets was that his grandparents never met Usha.
This was not El-Sayed’s first personal reference to the Second Lady. In an April podcast appearance, he speculated about her reaction to her husband’s rhetoric, saying “Damn, I have to sleep with him,” while also adding a reference to Vance’s children.
Vance used the moment to broaden his attack, calling aspects of El-Sayed’s worldview “very, very evil.”
The conflict unfolds against the backdrop of Michigan’s Senate race emerging as one of the key contests that could determine control of the US Senate. El-Sayed holds a narrow lead over Republican Mike Rogers in recent polling. Around 10 per cent of voters remain undecided.
(Edited by Maryam Hassan)
El-Sayed is a Islamist. Just like Mamdani.
And it’s so shameful that people like them are being egged on by the Democrats in the USA.