Abdul El-Sayed, Michigan's Democratic Senate nominee, posted a sneering jab about Second Lady Usha Vance on social media last Friday, implying that Vice President JD Vance's late grandparents wouldn't have accepted their Indian American daughter-in-law. Usha's response, in a Fox & Friends interview airing Wednesday, started with four words that probably weren't in El-Sayed's playbook: "I kind of laughed."
The party of tolerance, ladies and gentlemen.
Here's the backstory. Vice President Vance was at a rally in Ohio when he brought up El-Sayed's past defense of Sharia law. "He once argued, not too long ago, that criticisms of Sharia law were rooted in White supremacy," Vance told the crowd. "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's response wasn't to defend his Sharia law position. Instead, he went after Vance's wife. On August 22nd, El-Sayed posted: "So do we think JD is taking Usha with him back in time to meet Papaw, or no…" The implication was about as subtle as a sledgehammer — JD Vance's Appalachian grandparents, James "Papaw" Vance and Bonnie "Mamaw" Vance, wouldn't have approved of their grandson marrying an Indian American woman.
Then he doubled down in an MSNOW interview. "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," El-Sayed said. "And 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."
Except that's not what Vance was implying at all. Vance was criticizing El-Sayed's defense of Sharia law. El-Sayed turned it into a race thing because answering the actual accusation would've required defending an indefensible position.
Usha Vance, who met JD at Yale Law School and married him in 2014, didn't take the bait. She went the other direction entirely. "I have to admit, I kind of laughed," she told Fox & Friends. "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."
"His aunt is like a second mother to me," she continued. "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."
JD Vance wrote about his grandparents extensively in his 2016 memoir "Hillbilly Elegy," where he described one of his great regrets as his grandparents never getting to meet his wife. El-Sayed either didn't read the book or didn't care.
The whole exchange reveals something El-Sayed probably didn't intend to reveal. A Democratic Senate candidate — the son of Egyptian immigrants, running as a progressive champion of diversity — attacked a woman of color for marrying into a white Appalachian family. He assumed the worst about working-class people he's never met, projected racism onto a dead man who can't defend himself, and somehow thought this made him look like the enlightened one.
Another one of El-Sayed's attacks on Usha Vance
Usha and JD Vance have four children together, including their youngest, Alec, born just a month ago. She didn't rage. She didn't call for apologies. She laughed, talked about how much she loves her husband's family, and said she wishes she'd had the chance to meet the grandparents who raised them.
El-Sayed swung at the Second Lady's family and hit himself.