Second lady Usha Vance pushed back on Michigan Democratic Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed after he questioned whether Vice President JD Vance's late grandfather would have accepted her, a remark critics called racist.
El-Sayed, the American-born son of Muslim Egyptian immigrants, posted his comment on X after JD Vance took aim at him during a rally in Ohio. The vice president had invoked his late grandfather, known as "Papaw", while criticizing El-Sayed's past stance that objections to Sharia law, the Islamic legal code, were rooted in white supremacy. El-Sayed's response landed like a grenade: "So do we think JD is taking Usha with him back in time to meet Papaw, or no..."
The implication was hard to miss. El-Sayed suggested that JD Vance's Appalachian grandparents would not have welcomed an Indian-American daughter-in-law, a suggestion that dragged the vice president's deceased family members into a racial insinuation about his wife.
Usha Vance, who met JD Vance at Yale Law School and married him in 2014, addressed the remark in an exclusive interview with "Fox & Friends" set to air Wednesday at 6 a.m. ET. Fox News Digital reported that her response was both pointed and personal.
"I have to admit, I kind of laughed. 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."
She went further, calling JD Vance's aunt "like a second mother to me."
"And so I have to think that if they raised children like that, they would have been loving as well. And I would have really, really, really loved to have met them."
James Vance, "Papaw", died in 1997. His wife Bonnie, known as "Mamaw," died roughly eight years later. Both grandparents helped raise JD Vance, and their role in his life became central to his 2016 memoir Hillbilly Elegy, in which he wrote that one of his "great regrets" was that they never had the chance to meet his wife. The couple now has four children.
Rather than walk the comment back, El-Sayed used a Saturday interview on MS NOW to reframe it as a policy critique. He argued that JD Vance believes "there are some people who are more American than others because they can point to their Papaw who was here earlier."
"My question to him is simply: 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."
But that explanation does not square with the plain text of his original post. El-Sayed did not ask JD Vance about immigration policy or the definition of American identity. He asked whether Vance would bring his Indian-American wife "back in time" to meet his grandfather, a question that only works if you assume the grandfather would have rejected her on the basis of race or ethnicity.
El-Sayed's campaign did not return Fox News Digital's request for comment.
The exchange started at JD Vance's Ohio rally, where the vice president targeted El-Sayed's record directly. Vance told the crowd that El-Sayed had "once argued, not too long ago, that criticisms of Sharia law were rooted in White supremacy."
He then tied the remark to his own family history:
"I'd love to go back in time and tell my Papaw that there is a man who claims to stand for working people who says not only should we have Sharia law, but if you criticize it, you're a White supremacist. That's not my Papaw's Democratic Party, my friends."
El-Sayed won Michigan's Democratic primary for the state's open U.S. Senate seat and will face Republican Mike Rogers in the general election. His response to the vice president's rally attack drew attention not for its substance but for the racial dimension critics identified, questioning whether a white Appalachian family would accept a non-white spouse.
El-Sayed's post targeted the second lady's race and her place in the Vance family. His Saturday defense recast the remark as a challenge to JD Vance's views on immigration and belonging. Those are two different arguments. The first one, the one he actually posted, reduced Usha Vance to a prop in a racial thought experiment about her husband's dead grandfather.
Usha Vance answered it the way the family members El-Sayed was speculating about apparently would have: with warmth, not venom. She spoke about the people who raised her husband, said they produced a loving family, and expressed genuine regret that she never got to meet them.
When a Senate candidate's best political instinct is to question whether a dead man would have loved his own granddaughter-in-law because of her skin color, voters in Michigan have all the information they need about his judgment.
