Last updated on January 23rd, 2025 at 12:51 pm
“She was generally appalled…from the moment of his first election,” a friend of Usha Vance told reporters
Believe it or not, Usha Vance once had a view in common with the majority of Americans: she reportedly believed Trump was responsible for inciting the January 6, 2021, insurrection at the Capitol, and found it “deeply disturbing.”
That’s according to a Washington Post report published Saturday, based on interviews with more than two dozen of her friends, former co-workers and classmates. “Usha found the incursion on the Capitol and Trump’s role in it to be deeply disturbing,” one friend told the Post. Vance also registered to vote as a Democrat at least twice, according to the Post, and until this month worked as a litigator at a progressive San Francisco law firm.
The friend added to the Post: “She was generally appalled by Trump, from the moment of his first election.”
But then again, so was her husband, Trump’s newly-crowned running mate Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio). As Mother Jones has covered, J.D. Vance once called Trump “cultural heroin,” “reprehensible,” and “a cynical asshole…or America’s Hitler.” (On Facebook, according to the Post, Usha Vance praised her husband’s 2016 essay for the Atlantic, in which he called Trump “cultural heroin, “for publicly taking a “firm stand against Trump.”) Since then, though, he—and, apparently, his wife—have gone through something of a metamorphosis. J.D. Vance has called people arrested for their role in the insurrection “political prisoners.” And as my colleague David Corn reported this week, he also endorsed a book that praised the January 6 rioters and called progressives “unhuman.” (And as I reported, this is not the only book by a right-wing extremist that Vance has endorsed.)
