Episode 37: We Need to Talk About Usha

Hello, I'm Adrienne Dobb.

And I'm Moira Donegan.

Whether we like it or not, we're in bed with the right.

So, Adrienne, today we are joined by Irin Carmone, friend of the pod, friend of the Clayman Institute, friend of mine, and a really gifted writer at New York Magazine who is the author of this fantastic profile, one of the best, I think, of this election season.

What is Usha Vance thinking?

Here to decipher the enigmatic would-be second lady who, on the one hand, seems like the product and the beneficiary of a lot of sort of classical second-wave feminist gains, and on the other hand, has allied herself to a man really trying to undo the past 60 years of gender politics.

Irin, thank you so much for being with us.

I'm so thrilled to be here.

Thanks for having me.

So, something that was really interesting to me about this profile is that Usha gave you like nothing to work with, right?

Like she is

so silent and so reserved

and so

poker-faced about the contradictions of her own life that you had to do what I thought was a really skillful write-around.

Can you tell us just about the process of trying to decode this person?

Sure.

So you're right that she's somebody who has exercised a tremendous amount of control over her image.

She's only given one speech on the campaign trail this year,

which was at the RNC.

Obviously, a very high-profile speech, but just purely focused on her husband.

Did not mention Trump.

She has also given two interviews, one with her husband and one without to Fox News since

just in this year.

And before that, she really wasn't seen very much outside of these very, you know, silent

wife by her husband's side on election night appearances.

But that said, she is from a world that is very familiar to me because I've done a lot of reporting on elite lawyers and elite law schools.

And in particular, in 2021, I did an investigative piece about Jed Rubenfeld and Amy Chua.

It began, that story began as investigating sexual harassment allegations against Yale Law School professor Jed Rubenfeld.

And during the time that I was working on it, it,

his wife Amy Chua, who is perhaps better known, although Jed is currently, you know, defending RFK Jr.

and

offering legal advice to Trump.

So they're kind of vying in the public eye here.

But Amy Chua, of course, had this smash success with her memoir, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother.

And it happened that Amy Chua is the reason that we have Hillbilly Elegy, J.D.

Vance's memoir.

And were it not for Hillbilly Elegy, we would not have J.D.

Vance tag teaming with Donald Trump the way we do right now.

And so I began with a baseline kind of understanding of the way that power functions at Yale Law School for those who would like to have a particular kind of career,

the most prestigious career at Yale Law School involving clerkships for Supreme Court justices and assorted distinctions.

And Usha was somebody who had really excelled in this world.

And so one of the things that I was really interested in is how does somebody who is really good at excelling in a certain kind of way then become subsumed into this

purportedly anti-elitist

world in which macho swagger and not,

you know, smart, competent, discretion, working the levers of power quietly as opposed to kind of the open suck up and bullying of the MAGA world.

How does somebody somebody undergo that transformation?

And so with a mix of talking to her, mostly her legal world contemporaries, although I tried to cast as

broad of a swath as I could in the very short time that I had for this piece.

Because I was on book leave, I actually only had about three and a half weeks to write this piece.

And there were a lot of people who interacted with her along the way.

I did the best that I could.

But the the people and the world were already pretty familiar to me.

So I began with that kind of question and moved from there.

I think it's really interesting that you mentioned right off the bat, Amy Chua and Jed Rubenfeld, right?

And Amy Chua is the figure, as you mentioned, who gave us J.D.

Vance, but she also made Yale Law

into

a place that, as you say, has like a really specific kind of social

hierarchy that requires

very, very specific skill sets from her protégés.

I mean, I've read your piece on Amy Chuen and Jen Rubenfeld

at Yale Law when it came out a few years ago in New York Magazine.

And ever since then, I've sort of had the shorthand

for Yale Law as like a cross between like the secret history and like eyes wide shut.

You know, it's just like it's dark, there's weird sex stuff, there is

like a lot of alcohol, the elite badly behaving, right?

So could you tell us a little bit about how they they did at Yale Law?

Because it seems like they had, you know, they were together for most of the time.

They were in law school.

It seems like they had pretty different experiences.

Right.

Well, I mean, I, you know, I do need to say that the Amy Chu, I think, is complicated.

You know, what you described about navigating this party world in which you would

have to be sort of like laughing along while you were sexually harassed or worse by powerful men is certainly real.

But it's also the case that Amy,

by having this kind of magnetic, extroverted personality, also mentored people who found themselves sort of on the outside or felt themselves to be on the outside of Yale Law School, who weren't in the old boy network, who she thought had interesting, compelling stories, people like JD, who came from a really difficult background,

you know, had been in the Marines, had

abusive childhood.

um addiction in his family and so on i i i not everyone that she mentored was like this many of them were young women who she kind of

groomed in a particular sort of way.

You know, I tell the story in the piece about a poker night at their house where the writer David Latt met Usha and JD as students, and it got cut for space.

But somebody else who was there was Judge Alex Kaczynski, the Ninth Circuit judge who resigned early rather than fully investigated for numerous allegations of sexually harassing people, including clerks.

And, you know, people, even now in this story now, but also back when I did the other piece, people would talk about how Amy would warn people, you know, I'll tell you the truth.

This guy will sexually harass you and you'll have to work really hard, but I'll help you if you want to do it.

And it's complicated because obviously this is a totally noxious way to

have to experience, you know.

wanting to pursue your professional ambitions that the price of admission is a bunch of creeps that you are expected to entertain and drink with.

But people told me that they appreciated that Amy was much more forthright about it, that she would be willing to tell people, well, this guy's a creep.

Let me know if you're okay with that.

Whereas other people would just kind of operate in this abstracted world of, you know, of course, this is what everyone wants to ascend to.

And it was a don't ask, don't tell.

And so I would say that JD excelled in that kind of informal world that Amy was kind of holding court.

It was certainly not the only way to get a clerkship at Yale Law School, and it was not the only way to succeed.

It was kind of a

fun and exciting one for a lot of people, even though it held a lot of peril and frankly, inequality.

You know, I have a quote from someone in my piece about how Amy allegedly didn't like Usha because she didn't play this game.

I think the word used was bullshit in the quote.

She

she didn't like to drink and gossip, and JD did.

And so I think that

Usha was somebody who was sort of, you know, a very traditional path of high achievement, got the perfect grades, impressed everyone she met, never made any waves, right?

Never offended anyone.

Everyone seemed to like her.

People said she was really likable, but nobody felt like they really knew her very well.

Whereas JD was someone who could hang and was clearly extremely malleable, depending, we see this to this day, depending on who he was around and who he was sucking up to, he would thrive in that particular way.

And I think, you know, I have a quote from somebody,

Chris Lipinik, a lawyer in Los Angeles, who knew them both well in law school, who says that when they first got together, he asked JD, what drew you to Usha?

And he said, her ambition.

And I'm sure it's not the only thing that drew them together, but she was somebody who actually really understood how to navigate this world of elite conventional achievement.

I mean, the first thing we have to say about that poker night, there are so many nightmare blunt rotations in this piece.

It's just, it's incredible.

Oh, yeah.

And of course, Alex Kaczynski was the boss of Brett Kavanaugh for whom Usha clerked, just to close that circle.

Yeah, no, exactly.

I think one thing that your piece does a really good job at is that in some way,

there is an indication that, I mean, Usha sort of doesn't participate in the kind of skull and bones but for misfits kind of thing that Rubenfeld and Chua are selling.

And I should say that, you know, I know a few Chua pets myself, and they all describe the allure of this.

At the same time, it's clear that

the episode with which you open

the piece about Usha kind of running interference for Brett Kavanaugh eventually, it does seem that she subscribes to the same kind of familial view of women's empowerment as Chua does, right?

How can he be sexist?

He gave me a job, right?

um, interestingly, in that anecdote, she is pushing back on Amy Chua, right?

She's saying, don't believe this snarky, slut-shaming rumor that Amy Chua leaked to the press.

Although, frankly, I don't, I am being much more acerbic in my paraphrasing than I think either of them would ever actually be.

But I mean, Chua had made the same argument, right?

She's like, if I really believed this, would I send my daughter to clerk with him, right?

Like, it's all threaded through the immediate family and through, you know, friendship networks, and to say, like, how can he be bad when he never grabbed my butt?

There's two quasi-pseudo-feminisms operating here that you've identified, I think.

And one is

the real Amy Chua, as I've been given to understand it by people when they're, you know, being very

open about it, is at least she's honest, this kind of ribald,

you know, purportedly pragmatic, men are always going to be pigs.

So women can just have a whisper network and tell each other, you know, this guy will grab your butt,

dress nicely for Brett Kavanaugh, as Amy later admitted she had done, because it'll help you, but I'm also getting you a job.

And

then there is the,

I don't even know if it's a quasi-feminism, because it really is almost just a tribalism,

which is that I have to defend my hearth and home.

And I think you could read that Kavanaugh anecdote alongside two other points in the piece.

And one is that

when they do this joint interview in 2017 with Megan Kelly, and JD says, Usha is so loyal that when our dog got in trouble at daycare, you know, she said, the daycare is not good enough for our dog.

And she said, but it isn't.

And that when,

you know, that when she finally does talk about Kavanaugh, you know, in public, because that email is an email she just sent to her law school classmates, it's to identify with his wife for quietly standing by him.

I'm sure we'll have a lot more to say about that, but I just think, you know,

the smallness of this vision recedes to how bad could he be?

He gave me a job.

Or maybe he's bad, but I have to defend him because his badness reflects on my professional qualifications.

And what else reflects on my professional or personal qualifications or reputation, perhaps is a better word for it?

Then

I must stand by my man.

I must stand by my boss.

I must form a united front.

I'll stand by my dog the same way that I would stand by JD running with Donald Trump.

And I'm not even sure you could call that feminism as much as it is a sort of blood loyalty.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Even in the most distorted vision of what feminism could be.

Well, it occurs to me on several levels, there is a way in which

Usha's impulses towards this kind of quasi-tribalistic loyalty and defensiveness towards those in her circle is really characteristic of a lot of the conservative femininities we've been identifying together on our podcast, right?

It is a

small circle of people whose loyalty is earned either through blood or through transaction, right?

And it is a willingness or it implies a willingness to stake one's own reputation out of

the ongoing ability to be of service to these men, right?

The

public servility to somebody like Kavanaugh that she exhibited in that email where she says, no, I want to refute

this rumor attributed to Amy Chua that to get a Kavanaugh clerkship as a woman, you have to be very good looking

is the same kind of impulse that she is now exhibiting when she, you know, clutches J.D.

Vance's arm and attests to his good character on stage at the RNC.

I mean, it's also, I mean, the other part of this, and that's a little bit awkward for

an episode that's featuring three white people, but there is also, of course, a racial and immigration component here, I think, right?

There is this implicit offer,

especially I would say to Asian Americans, frankly, to be kind of the good one, the good kind, right?

The one that you hold everyone else up against to say, like, well, she could do it, why can't you?

And the way in your piece you pull together sort of her comments on

legal immigration versus illegal immigration, assimilation, and also religion, right?

The fact that she's

the role Hinduism seems to play in her household.

It's not that there's anything kind of intrinsic there, but it is always trying to make the

distinction between,

you know, my,

you've let me into these spaces and I will,

I won't let you, I won't let you forget it.

I won't let you, I won't let you down

versus, you know, maybe I'm I was smart and brilliant enough to be in those spaces anyway and screw you and your rules, right?

She very much seems to embody the former.

And

there is a, you know, racialized components to that.

There's also, of course, a class component to that.

It may well be what she and JD ultimately share, right?

That he also

feels through his extremely complicated and anxious relationship to his own bloodline, for lack of a better term, is kind of provisionally accepted into this world.

And it's just so and wants to just perform gratefulness in all ways.

And that is something something that, yeah, that a kid from the wrong side of the tracks in Appalachia and

the child of recent immigrants might sort of share.

It may be, although

I think that's a compassionate read.

I think that there's another read of Usha's class background, which is that

she is from a family of academics in India.

Her great aunt-in-law is like a distinguished scientist who's still teaching at the age of 90 something, who was interviewed in the Indian press press about how she's still, you know, such a distinguished scientist.

In the U.S., obviously, the immigration discourse can be flattened a certain way.

I think there was an instinct similar, probably,

I don't know if it was identical, but as I was beginning the piece, I was thinking about the way that liberals have initially projected on

Melania Trump.

Okay, she's an immigrant.

She seems to hate her husband.

Maybe she actually disagrees with him.

Well, she seems to hate her husband.

We know that much.

The rest of it, in terms of where her sympathies lie, seem to be projection.

Ivanka Trump might actually be a better analogy, daughter immigrant, also.

Somebody who kind of seemed to want to play it both ways.

And initially, in the very beginning of the Trump family's introduction as political figures, seemed so polished, so polite, had moved through elite circles in New York.

And also, I think potentially similar to Usha, sort of seemed to send signals that said I might be on your side now that all fell by the wayside in the real swing of the Trump administration but during the campaign in 2016 I think there was this feeling of like oh well how bad could it be Jared and Ivanka we know them from New York or from Harvard or from Penn

and so I think that there's there was a little bit of a

an assumption that because of Usha's sort of telegraphing a particular kind of position that she might be a liberal.

And it's not that she necessarily wasn't before, it just seems to have been a very thin affiliation.

So I was told by a friend of theirs that JD had told them that

Usha voted for Hillary in 2016.

She was registered as a Democrat in different jurisdictions where she lived.

How committed was she to these beliefs?

I don't know.

But she grew up upper middle class.

Her parents were academic scientists.

Her mother's the provost of the California State Campus in San Diego.

So it's a different kind of immigration.

I mean, I am also an upper middle class immigrant.

It's just my parents are lawyers.

You know, I'm white.

And so that's different from what Usha, I'm sure Usha experienced much more people treating her like an other purely out of people's ignorance or inability to pass as white.

But there is also this tradition of Indian American conservatism, and you actually don't need to look further in the U.S.

that you don't need to look further than even their classmate who was both from Ohio and Indian American, Vivek Ramaswamy,

who was in their class at Yale Law School and was friendly with them and they in Ohio have spent

Thanksgiving together, he said.

And he described Usha buying children's books for his children.

Obviously, Nikki Haley, Bobby Jindal, both Indian American governors that were Republican.

And, you know, one thing that I kept doing reading your piece was trying to

find that thread to grasp onto.

I thought maybe part of the explanation is a Hindu Vata sympathy.

And maybe that is what converted her into like American conservatism.

And then I got to the part in your piece where you talk about her clerking for Roberts.

And you said that Roberts wrote Hawaii versus Trump.

the case that upheld the Muslim ban while she was his clerk.

And I thought, aha, I've got it.

Like it's an anti-Muslim bigotry that was her entree into the American conservative ideology.

And that's what did it.

And then you have in a parentheses, like people who worked with her at the time said she didn't work on that opinion.

And I felt like lost again.

I don't know enough about how she thinks of her Indian heritage or her parents' Indian heritage.

She knows she was born in California.

She grew up, she talked about growing up in a community of immigrants.

I mean, I, you know, I didn't use them for the piece, but I looked at photos because

somebody was saying to me the cringe factor of this story, too, is that like the first millennial to run, you know, on a major party ticket, that there are these Facebook photos, and I'm around the same age as them,

of Usha and her high school friends, totally normal, like them partying in high school.

And they call themselves the booty tag crew.

I don't know what it means.

I didn't get into it for my piece.

Just corny shit that people did in high school.

And she stayed, and she, you can see from these photos that she had an enormously diverse friend group that included immigrants from all over the world.

This is a California story, of course.

And it included African-American friends, white friends, Asian American friends from all over the world,

all over the region.

And

she

stayed friends with them.

I believe she's still friends with many of them.

They were bridesmaids at her wedding, you know.

So, I don't, I don't know how much to sort of impute, you know, one factor of her upbringing versus another.

To me, what seemed most powerful was this idea of being a kind of

empty vessel of the meritocracy

to say, okay, this is the next thing that I'm supposed to accomplish.

And

then the next, and then the next.

And then having a kind of like reverse my feral lady with JD,

where she is the one to mold him to the folk ways that she has understood because she went to Yale college, too.

And she was the Sally Torin at his high school.

Right.

And he says this.

And also, but in a more conventional gendered way, she's like the civilizer.

You know, he's this angry

outsider and she's the voice on his shoulder telling him, you know, he described that it was first his grandmother who raised him and then it was her.

So she's both introducing him to this world.

She's the insider in this formulation.

She may have felt like an outsider at various times, but in the way that he describes it, she's telling him what fork to use.

And they use that in the movie.

Is that going to be the sequel to Hillbilly Allergy?

From Chuapet to Ushapet?

Yeah.

I'm very interested in the ways in which the family loyalty that we talked about, there was a change in him.

I mean, the change in him obviously seems to have been

instrumental.

You know,

realizing that he would not have a political future if he was an anti-Trump Republican, which is what he began as.

But how much of it for him is sincere?

Yeah.

Where Usha gets together with a guy at Yale Law School who has

a different background than a lot of other people at Yale Law School, but is so egalitarian that he tells a friend that he is willing to be a stay-at-home dad.

And the assumption here is that Usha's career is skyrocketing.

And then, you know, less than 10 years later,

She's resigning from her law firm.

She's most likely made professional sacrifices for his professional ambitions.

All of her friends are talking to the press about how, and to be clear, her friends also can't believe that this has happened.

So it's not just, you know, resistance liberals being like, surely this brown woman can't believe this.

People who know her very well are either befuddled or angry, or they just think there's no way she believes this.

She's just playing along because she loves him.

And so, you know,

she's experienced something just in the last

really four years since he converted to MAGA and converted to Catholicism in the last five years that is different from the man that she married.

And it just so happens that it's playing out in a stage in which we all might end up living under this man's rule and not just Usha.

Yeah, it's so interesting.

I also think

some of that

must point to this.

this the fact that some of those liberal credentials, and this is, I think, where we get back to Ivanka Trump to some extent, can be quite skin deep.

How much of that, maybe before really Trump came on the scene, some of that could just be habitual, right?

A kind of habitual liberalism, right?

When you write that, you know, that

she may be, quote, holding her nose as she participates, or at least that she would like people to believe that she is, right?

There, I underline that.

I was like, Ivanka, right?

Like, this gesture of signaling possible non-participation when there's nothing to suggest non-participation,

Like the kind of creminology that was like invited by, you know, Jarwanka

to like, to resolve a cognitive dissonance that comes with the kind of reorientation that you just described, right?

Which is so common in the United States these days.

There is this kind of this kind of skin-deep liberalism.

that appears to be quite easy to discard for people who are, you know, whose investments are ultimately in the goodness and brightness of institutions that have made them extremely rich or extremely powerful.

Or the goodness and the brightness of themselves.

Yeah.

Because she then says, if I didn't think, she says this in the Fox News interview, I didn't quote it, but there's this vague sort of, if I didn't think that he could do a lot of good for the country, like good, like what does that mean?

For whom and for what and to what ends?

But it's just this sort of like vague thing of I believe in JD and JD will do good.

without bothering yourself too much with the particulars of the actual harm or damage in the world.

You know, know,

I think we're circling around two cognitive dissonances here.

And one, like, Irin, I think you just hit on, is, is this idea that the people who inhabit these like liberal-coded institutions or liberal-coded social circles, you know, people at Yale

or for that matter, Stanford,

who might, you know, live on a coastal city and have a lot of gay friends, that those people might also

become conservatives or harbor conservative beliefs.

It's something I think a lot of people who are close to the folks who wind up doing that don't understand, right?

Maybe because they have failed to consider how their own participation in such institutions and their own lifestyle implicates them in these same hierarchies, right?

So that's the one cognitive dissonance.

Like, how could this person with these like liberal, social, and professional trappings have conservative beliefs or do

right-wing things?

And then there's another

one about what women's ambition means, right?

Because there's one way to look at Usha Vance

and say this person was clearly a gunner her whole life, right?

Salatorian at her high school, really good college,

gunning for those prestigious clerkships at Yale Law.

You mentioned in the piece, you have a line where like she stood out as ambitious at Yale Law, which is insane.

And then

she gets married and has a couple kids, and she kind of disappears.

You know, for a while, they move to Chicago.

She does crazy things, like immediately start clerking within weeks of giving birth to her first child at the Supreme Court.

But then she kind of disappears from her law firm a little bit.

She resigns eventually after kind of languishing as an associate.

She's working remotely.

It doesn't seem like she's doing those, you know, like 60, 80 hour associate weeks.

It seems like she's raising a bunch of kids, right?

And I think what we're identifying here is that there is a way for the meritocracy for women to involve actually

a withdrawal from paid work or from public sphere participation, because what you can do is climb the meritocracy almost vicariously via supporting a man that you've attached yourself to, right?

Like she

left her personal ambition a little bit behind

in one sense when she, you know, she's not a lawyer, practicing lawyer anymore, but she has accelerated her personal ambition in another way

by being, you know, a particle on the ship that is J.D.

Vance.

Yeah.

I mean, certainly you could compare it to Doug Emhoff, right?

Because he also resigned his law firm position.

A lot of people told me that they were surprised that she did that.

And I was like, well, but I thought it was customary because

Doug Mhoff did it when Kamala was nominated for vice president in 2020, just to avoid any kind of appearance of impropriety.

But I think you're right that there is a

question mark there because the most interesting sort of pivot point for both of them and their professional aspirations, which is that they began in this what we would think of as egalitarian sort of companionate marriage model, where he's even, or even more so, that he's claiming that he's going to subsume his career to hers.

And only a few years later,

she is

subordinate to his political ambitions.

And that happens to coincide chronologically with becoming a mother.

And I don't know how to disentangle it.

I don't know if anybody else or even she would be able to disentangle it, but she does have three children

under the age of eight.

And, you know, I have two children.

My two younger children are younger than her, or are the same age as her younger children.

And I frankly find it incomprehensible

to, I don't know, to be on the campaign trail with them.

You know, like we just, you know, went away for the weekend and nobody slept for a week.

It is genuinely hard, I think, to

be present for small people

and still maintain this sort of punishing political career that involves traveling all over the place, that includes running for Senate.

But it is a fact that when they, when she accepted her clerkship, I think like this is actually worth stepping back and looking at the chronology here, because Usha becomes pregnant, finds out she's pregnant after she's already accepted the clerkship on the Supreme Court because the hiring arc is like really far in advance, right?

The scheduling is really far in advance.

So, she's interviewing for clerkships with lots of different justices, which is a very elite thing, like very hard to get even one interview.

She's interviewed by, I was told, Clarence Thomas and Soda Mayor and Roberts.

She winds up accepting a position, which actually shows you what a cipher she was ideologically.

Because I mean, justices will hire clerks who are slightly different or ambiguous ideologically if they're distinguished enough, but still to have that much of a range is the first time I've ever heard of anyone doing that.

And then she finds out she's pregnant when she's already accepted the clerkship, is my understanding.

And this is the part where, as JD talks about it, he

This is what he describes as, it's the most transgressive thing I've ever done.

Uh, which I thought, you know, again, this is so interesting because I also note that he keeps saying,

although I noted he didn't do this yesterday, he keeps saying, My wife has three children.

But in a podcast he did yesterday, I noticed he said, We have three children like 10 times.

So, I think he read that.

Yeah, a lot of people noticed that he was doing that.

Yeah, no, a lot of people noticed he was doing it at the Times interview.

Yes, and I realized that he had actually been doing it since 2022.

So, I guess what I'm saying is that so in the interim, not only does she become pregnant, but there's a senate seat open in Ohio and it's the one he doesn't actually end up running for but when he returns to Ohio it's while she's still pregnant with their first child so when their son is born and you and I talked about this a little bit before when their son is born they're actually technically on paper living apart.

He's in Ohio, she's in D.C.

And when her mother comes to stay with them to help stay with her is the actual accurate term.

This man who once said, I'm going to be a stay-at-home dad has actually, in the service of his ambition, decided to live in a different state, again, at least for the purposes of establishing residency to run for senate.

He doesn't choose to run in that race, but that was like, why does he need to start his, I'm going to fix the opioid crisis thing this particular year when there's a Republican primary in the Senate coming up?

Gee, you don't think that that could wait because of your family concerns?

So After that, there is this kind of split where she moves to Ohio after her clerkship.

That's not what's where her firm doesn't have offices.

She has two more children.

How much of this was a constrained choice?

How much of it was a real choice?

All I know is that in the ensuing years, GD takes a sharp right turn.

He converts to Catholicism.

Around 2020, he realizes, he says that he's wrong about Trump.

He becomes, he's sort of openly auditioning for Trump's endorsement in the next Senate race that he does run for and is elected for thanks to Trump.

And so

how do you disentangle

his religious conversion, his political conversion, becoming a parent, and whatever she may have wanted to do herself.

I just simply do not know how you can, even in her head.

As I was teasing this out with her friends, trying to understand how they saw it, knowing her, I kept thinking, well, let's be fair, you know, they were compared to Bill and Hillary Clinton when David Latt ran into them in terms of like the energy and the power couple dynamic and the Yale Law affiliation.

But you don't have to have J.D.

Vance's politics to end up with a marriage that looks very conventional in terms of putting male ambition first.

So I actually don't know if it was his MAGA conversion as much as his sort of reversion to a traditional gendered

norm or mean,

particularly when having children is involved.

I mean, there could have been an element in which, you know, her trying to

be both a Supreme Court clerk and the mother of a newborn may have accelerated this transition, because that was a way that they spent a year, right?

And well, and he could have made that easier, is what I guess I'm saying.

Elizabeth Preligar, you know, there was a piece in Vanity Fair that Christian Farias did that said that Elizabeth Preligar had a very similar timeline.

And they actually, she clerked for Justice Ginsburg, and they actually, she actually brought her baby to work at the Supreme Court.

Yeah.

And I imagine that if you can do that if you're clerking for Ginsburg, I don't know if you can do that if you're clerking for Roberts.

It always would have been hard.

In what ways did J.D.'s choices make it much harder?

But it occurs to me that what J.D.

Vance is proposing for the American social order is just an expansion of what happened in his own marriage, right?

This egalitarian arrangement in which a man and a woman are both taking their ambitions seriously and both being understood as agents and subjects of the union being reversed into one in which he is the public actor.

and she is the silent shadow whose life is reorganized around his whims and desires.

Right.

And he elaborately gives her credit for being his support and being at his side and being smarter than him in ways that are very familiar and very traditional but sound like i'm just saying oh my wife's smarter than me my wife's more impressive than me absolutely i mean and and you know in the beginning it was put out there that she wasn't going to be on the campaign trail because she doesn't like it and then she gave a very rare phone interview just last week to nbc news in which she said um And she has been present, the kids have been present, their dog has been present.

After they said that she wouldn't be, a campaign advisor was on the record saying saying that and she said she didn't think that the children would be a feature but now they are um i sort of connect it to uh people saying that jd vance was weird spreading the funny lie about the couch suddenly it's like his wife and kids are behind him to be like no look who married him look at these beautiful adorable children would a couch fucker have this many children yeah right right no and i mean even my mother was like she seems nice you know i mean it is a sort of it's a classic like the wife she's the civilizer now she's the humanizer how bad could he be if this lovely seeming woman married him and then that that she then gives an interview last week in which she said i i'm basically i'm paraphrasing but she says i'm basically here to support him and be at his side like she's also his sort of like emotional support uh in a way that is a fully kind of self-effacing thing, which is just like, I hate being here, but I'm going to be here because he needs me.

Now, there's a way in which that's a loving sacrifice to make for someone, but viewed in the context of JD Vance's agenda for women and everyone who doesn't conform with gender or sexuality norms, it does start to seem pretty creepy.

Now, she may be joyfully choosing this, but this is what this is what they're signaling to everybody is this sort of,

you know, I go through, I had to listen to and I read like hundreds of hours of transcripts of J.D.

Vance on podcasts around before he declared for vice presidency and also after, before he was chosen for the vice presidency.

And his, he was not that vocal.

I mean, in the Hillbilly elegy Js, gender politics were not his thing.

But now, you know, there are, there's a, in a voluminous record of him talking about

not just the emptiness of elite values, sometimes specifically narrating Usha's trajectory.

or their that of their friends, including friends who may have struggled with infertility or may have chosen not to have children.

When he's talking about the childless cat ladies, yes, he's named members of the Democratic Party, but he's talking about people working 90 hours a week at McKinsey or Goldman Sachs or the New York Times.

These are all people that they know.

These are Usha's friends.

He sometimes even said Usha's friends have struggled to get pregnant, things like that.

And he's also narrating

a particular and hierarchical view of gender difference.

So he's saying men and women want different things.

They're doing different things.

He's talking to like this basically incel podcasters, and he's he's talking about a vision of masculinity as aggressive and protective.

And he hasn't always said this, you know?

I mean, even like as recently as I think it was like 2021, that podcast with the dude who's talking about the post-menopausal female and her purpose, he's saying it's, he's saying we shouldn't idealize the 1950s housewife.

My grandmother told me it was very lonely.

So I think that there has been this sort of, I don't know how much of it is a kind of like ex post facto justification of the way things turned out for his wife.

But it sounds a lot like he's talking about her her and her cohort.

And it seems very pointed in light of that kind of bait and switch or transformation that I described that is really different from the man that she married.

There's also a really big difference now when we go back to the comparison of the Clintons, isn't it?

For however much Bill and Hillary ended up having a pretty traditional marriage, actually, in some ways, right?

the rhetoric around it was always non-traditional.

The rhetoric around it always was way in advance of what the real relationship was like.

And that's what's so striking striking here: that this is a marriage that may have felt modern five years ago, but then

the rhetorical trappings around it are becoming with every passing month more reactionary and more sort of back

to the 50s kind of thing.

And that's really the kind of shocking thing to watch this sort of re-narrated and recast.

And as Moira was alluding, it's hard not to read into that a political program, right?

The return of Usha into the role that she's being cast into now is the role that Vance wants for her generation, basically, at the very least.

Right.

And it's one that repudiates everything that got them to this point, you know, which is just using the tools of these elite institutions out in the world in public.

You know, do I think, and I will say that he is also very deft and has been as a sort of like this new right thing in co-opting certain language of the left.

And he does so also when he's talking about gender politics, right?

You know, he says something like,

I believe he said this in the wake of Dobbs, where he said that anyone who tells you that 90 hours a week making partner at McKinsey is a path to fulfillment, you know, is lying to you.

Again, I'm paraphrasing.

Well, yeah, I mean, on the left, you might say, like, that sounds a lot like a critique of lean in feminism.

But what what is the remedy in JD's mind?

It's not, oh, we should have

a socialist utopia.

Or perhaps it's a socialist utopia that is enabled by unpaid female labor, dressed up as, oh, I believe in caregiving and kinship.

Like somehow it still ends up being this hierarchical thing with the head of the household being JD.

This is what I stress, you know, I think that year is so instructive because is it transgressive?

This is the word he used for him to rely on the unpaid labor of his mother-in-law instead of hiring a nanny.

Is it more transgressive for him to say, you know what, I'm not going to move to Ohio right now because my wife needs me.

My soon-to-be-born son needs me.

Caregiving is important to me because, you know, as I understood it when he was talking about wanting to be a stay-at-home dad, it was because of the profound absence of a father figure, a stable father figure that he felt in his own childhood.

So, you know, money wasn't an issue for them.

He had, he was sponsored by Peter Thiel already at that point.

You know, he had worked in big law.

There was, you know,

money was not an issue for them.

Ambition was the issue for them.

And he could have chosen a path that would have put caregiving more at the center of his life, even just for that short period.

So I think it's a really valid question.

And I also think, you know, he also has said things like universal daycare is a class war on normal people.

And so, you know, the assumption being that normal people want to

have

somebody turns out to be, you know, the female partner, the mother at home,

somehow unpaid or perhaps subsidized somehow by the state.

And yet he talks about how my wife is a working mother.

He himself never describes himself as a working father, even though, you know, he's of our generation.

I think he understands the distinction.

He's a working mother.

She needs to juggle.

And also, talking about how they, in fact, have had paid child care, which is, there's no shame in paid child care.

It's how I'm sitting here with you right now.

But to say that normal people have an unpaid female caregiver at home obviously is a value judgment about what is the ideal American family.

Thank you so much, Irin.

This is wonderful.

You're so good at this.

It's fun to have this much time to talk about it.

It's a really fun piece.

No, it's so great.

And I mean, again, like the

way this biography

seems so unusual, right?

That's the kind of the hook for the piece.

And on the other hand, that at every step, you have this queasy sense of recognizability that this really is the story of a generation, maybe our generation,

and

maybe more prophetic in what it portends than any of us might like.

Yeah, it starts out as a kind of an interesting curiosity.

Like, why is this person the way she is?

And then,

you know, especially the stuff you say about Yale Law Schools, just so,

you know, yeah, these are the people who

are,

you know, busy playing a quartet while the Titanic is really starting to list on,

you know,

on democracy itself, on the liberal order itself.

I thought it was really just, it packed an enormous punch, and I really thank you for writing it.

Thank you so much.

I really enjoyed our conversation.

In Bed with the Right, we'd like to thank the Michelle R.

Clayman Institute for Gender Research for generous support.

Jennifer Portillo for setting up our studio.

Our theme music is by Katie Lyle.

Our producer is Megan Kalthas.