Usha Vance doesn’t do dishes — so why the wedding ring excuse?

JD and Usha Vance can’t escape rumors that their marriage is on the rocks. It’s been less than a month since the Turning Point USA (TPUSA) conference where the vice president hugged Erika Kirk, the organization’s CEO and chair, in an oddly intimate manner onstage. He also publicly insulted his wife by complaining she won’t leave her Hindu faith and convert to Catholicism. So it’s no surprise that the gossip mill churned earlier this month, when Usha Vance was spotted at an event with Melania Trump at Camp Lejeune in Jacksonville, North Carolina, without her wedding ring.

At first blush, this should not seem like a scandal. People forget their wedding rings and, despite her often robotic affect since her husband took office, the second lady is a human being. 

I was ready to write the story off until a spokesperson for the Vances released a statement that was so weirdly defensive it couldn’t help but raise suspicions. Usha Vance, the spokesperson insisted, is “a mother of three young children, who does a lot of dishes, gives lots of baths, and forgets her ring sometimes.”

As the second lady of the United States, Usha Vance is not some fantasy housewife swanning around a humble middle-class kitchen in a pinafore. That the vice president’s communications staff would try to pretend otherwise says quite a bit about the kind of image JD Vance is trying to project to the MAGA base — especially the young right-wing men he is obsessed with appealing to, who spend their days online consuming propaganda that demands a return to 19th-century gender roles.

Usha Vance may no longer have her job at a high-paying law firm that offered on-site childcare, but basic common sense should tell us she hasn’t transitioned to a life spent scouring piles of dirty dishes. She’s constantly traveling and appearing at events with her husband or other administration figures. The vice president and his wife also live at a sprawling mansion on the grounds of the Naval Observatory. A household staff, provided by the Navy, does the cooking, cleaning and maintenance work on the 9,000- square foot home. Former Second Lady Karen Pence even complained about the lack of privacy, because staff and Secret Service are around all the time.

In a recent interview with Meghan McCain, Usha Vance commented on the novelty of having a household staff. “I just can’t speak highly enough about the people who work here,” she said, describing how close her family is to the help, who “come upstairs all the time” to visit with her kids. “We go downstairs to the basement and admire all of their cooking,” she added. 

Usha Vance might wash a dish or two on occasion, as we all would. Sometimes you have a snack, and it’s easier to rinse off the plate than summon Jeeves to do it for you. But it defies logic that her home life is what this spokesperson would have you believe: That in between well-coiffed jaunts on Air Force Two, she spends most of her time elbow-deep in soapy water, washing either dishes or children.

But while this statement was dishonest, it does reveal a deeper truth about what the Vances, or at least the vice president himself. As I’ve written before for Salon, when the Vances married, JD seemed to appreciate that his wife was an ambitious career woman. But since entering politics, the vice president has burrowed himself not just into far-right ideology, but also the especially toxic “manosphere” world that valorizes female submission and traditional gender roles. During the campaign, a seemingly endless number of quotes were unearthed of Vance denouncing “cat ladies” — women he believed had put off having children to pursue a career, whom he described as “sociopathic” and “miserable.”

Vance has never said outright that women should not be allowed to work. But his views on marriage and family are so rigid that if people followed his prescriptions, most women would be unable to hold jobs outside of the home. He has denounced women who get abortions as lazy people trying to avoid “inconvenience.” He has argued against divorce, even in cases where the wives are suffering physical abuse. Even as his family benefited from employer-provided childcare, Vance rejected efforts to make day care available to all Americans, insisting that “grandma or grandpa wants to help out a little bit more.” Since few grandparents offer full-time childcare, this seemed to be a backdoor way of insisting that women leave their jobs. Women, he argued, don’t want to work anyway, and if they “shunt their kids into crap daycare,” it’s because some outside forces are forcing them to reject their true nature.

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These views are out of step with how real Americans live, including Vance’s own family. But they make sense in light of how he has shaped his political career around retrograde fantasies of perpetually online right-wing men. Vance was close friends with TPUSA founder Charlie Kirk before Kirk’s death in September, and he has since hosted Kirk’s podcast. The slain influencer openly argued that it’s a woman’s duty to forgo college and career in favor of getting married and“submit[ting] to your husband.” Even Vance’s relatively recent conversion to Catholicism is tied up in this. He’s not just Catholic; he embraces the most conservative strain of the faith as a means of rejecting much of the social progress that has been made since the 1960s, if not long before — which includes women’s liberation.

Vance is fooling himself if he thinks the foundation for electoral success is the sea of bitter online men who blame feminism for all their personal problems. With his consistent, overt signaling of “trad” sympathies, that’s the bet he is obviously making.

But there’s still a problem: His actual wife is a poor fit for the “tradwife” fantasy that gets these guys going. He also can’t divorce her and find someone, like Erika Kirk, who does a better job at playing the simpering helpmeet. If he did so, his quotes against divorce would be an online millstone around his neck.

Instead we are treated to a ham-fisted effort at pretending that Usha Vance spends her days strapped to a sponge. She is so busy scrubbing coffee cups and baby butts that she forgets that most precious piece of metal, her wedding ring. That, or Vance is publicly insulting his wife in hopes that she gets fed up and leaves him first. He does have a tendency to demean her in front of crowds with unfunny “jokes” at her expense, and anyone who has read his X feed knows that his petulance is often on full, unashamed display. Such a strategy would be a childish way for this adult man to act. But it wouldn’t be a surprise.