Far-right attacks target J.D. Vance’s wife Usha’s Indian heritage

But online, extremist supporters of Trump had already trained their attacks on Vance’s wife, Usha, over her Indian heritage, denigrating the couple, their mixed-race family and Usha Vance’s immigrant background.

Shortly after Trump announced Monday that Vance would be named as his running mate, far-right activist Jaden McNeil on X shared an undated picture of the Vances and their newborn child on a post captioned: “I’m sure this guy is going to be great on immigration.”

In a podcast in which he attacked the Vances, Nick Fuentes, an avowed white supremacist, repeated rhetoric often associated with the racist “great replacement theory” — a line of argument popular among the right-wing, white nationalist fringe that falsely claims that there is a plan to “replace” native-born White Americans with immigrants. Fuentes — who has also promoted antisemitism and who attended the deadly white nationalist rally in Charlottesville in 2017 — said he doesn’t expect “the guy who has an Indian wife” to “support White identity.”

“What exactly are we getting here? And that’s not a dig at him just because I’m a racist or something,” Fuentes said. “White people are being systematically replaced in America and in Europe through immigration and — to a much-lesser extent — due to intermarrying. This guy has a non-White wife.”

Fuentes — who visited Trump at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida in November 2022 alongside rapper Ye — also said on X that Usha Vance was “not raised Christian and is not Christian,” adding, “What kind of family is this?” Usha Vance’s parents are Hindu.

A spokesman for J.D. Vance did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The attacks highlight the tensions that Vance will navigate in a campaign where Trump has called for harsh anti-immigration measures and used violent rhetoric to describe migrants, including suggesting they be pitted in fights for entertainment.

In his best-selling memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy,” J.D. Vance wrote that he fell for his wife in their first year of law school and that she “seemed some sort of genetic anomaly, a combination of every positive quality a human should have: bright, hard-working, tall, and beautiful.”

Usha Vance, he said, was his “Yale spirit guide” who “instinctively understood the questions I didn’t even know to ask and she always encouraged me to seek opportunities that I didn’t know existed.”

As a Senate nominee in 2022, Vance himself appeared to echo some of the rhetoric behind the “great replacement theory” as well as conspiracy theories about voter fraud when he claimed in an interview with Tucker Carlson that Democrats were hoping to win the midterm elections by replacing American voters and bringing in “a large number of new voters to replace the voters that are already here.” Vance was playing into fears about election fraud, though it is rare in the United States.

American University professor Brian Hughes, who studies extremism and radicalization, said these extremists’ attacks on the Vances show that “anti-immigrant rhetoric and very standard White supremacist ideology frequently overlap.” Hughes said McNeil’s post questioning J.D. Vance’s views on immigration because of the makeup of his family is “a dog whistle towards White nationalism” and the “idea that the United States is and should be an exclusively White country.”

Still, he noted that views like those espoused by these extremists “are marginal voices within the broader far right.”

“That’s where these attacks will continue to come from,” he said. “I think that the vast majority of people in the American conservative movement don’t feel this way. And I think that’s to their credit.”

Some Republicans celebrated Usha Vance after her husband was named Trump’s running mate. Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.), a hard-line conservative, praised her in a post on X as “extremely impressive,” and lauded her credentials.

“Mom of 3, met JD at Yale Law School, degrees from Yale and Cambridge, corporate litigator, clerked for Supreme Court justices,” Luna wrote.