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The MAGA movement and the radical traditionalist Catholicism the provides one stream or religious legitimation for it aims to preserve the power and authority of White men in America. So many express surprise or confusion when they learn that J.D. Vance, the Republican nominee to Vice President in the 2024 election, is married to an Indian-American woman who is the daughter of Indian immigrants, and that his own children are of mixed ethnic heritage. How can that be? How can one of the most prominent spokespersons for the MAGA movement embody such a seemingly obvious contradiction? Check out this week’s episode to hear Dan’s reflections on these questions.
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It's In the Code, a series that is part of the podcast Straight White American Jesus.
And as always, I am Dan Miller, that part doesn't change, professor of religion and social thought at Landmark College.
Thrilled to be with you.
Gone last week, was on vacation.
I was actually in Cancun, first time I've ever been there, so that was That was fun.
It was also really hot.
I did not melt down.
I'm basically like a walking vanilla ice cream cone in the heat, and I just sort of disappear over time.
So pleased to have not melted, to have returned, to be with you, to talk today.
As always, love to hear from folks.
Daniel Miller Swag, DanielMillerSWAJ at gmail.com.
Feedback, comments, topics, you name it.
As always, typical caveat that I am late in responding to emails, but I am closing the gap, working on it.
But do read the emails and value so many of the insights that you have.
And with that said, I want to dive in today because I'm responding to, in this case, it was a text that a friend sent me.
But it's funny, since I got the text, I've had other people reach out with the same topic.
And I think it'll take us a few minutes.
I want to dive in, but it was really, really interesting.
And it's a topic that I think anybody who pays attention—I mean, really pays attention—to the current politics of Christian nationalism, and certainly the rhetoric and the dog whistles and everything else of contemporary Christian nationalism, will have wondered about this.
Anybody who has followed our discussion of, you know, Project 2025 as a blueprint for a second Trump presidency will be wondering about this.
Anyone who has tracked the mainstream so-called replacement theory within the class of right-wing talking heads will have wondered about this.
And the topic is J.D.
Vance, J.D.
Vance, GOP nominee for vice president, champion of MAGA, champion of Project 2025, that J.D.
Vance, Our topic is his marriage to a woman of color and the fact that he has three biracial children.
Now, I know some people are going to start to squirm as soon as I say that.
And basically, I'm like, we're going to focus on the race of his partner.
And people will be like, oh, that feels weird.
Here's the issue.
If somebody says, Dan, why are you focusing on race this way?
Do you have a problem that Vance is married to a woman of color?
She's the daughter of two Indian immigrants or that he has biracial children?
No, not at all.
I don't care.
I affirm it.
I think it's awesome.
I don't care at all, in the best positive sense of not caring who people choose to marry and racial identity and all that sort of stuff.
But the reason it comes up is because this is all about as off of the MAGA brand as somebody can be.
There are lots of MAGA people who would have issues with this, and one would think that J.D.
Vance, as MAGA champion, as the guy writing prefaces to books about Project 2025, As all of those things, that JD Vance would, I don't know, have some consciousness of the fact that it seems like his family contradicts core components of the MAGA brand.
And that is what people have reached out to me about.
Basically, they've said, how does Vance square this?
How does this fit with the MAGA brand?
How does Vance come out As essentially supposed to be the policy thinker and one of the attack dogs for the brand MAGA, Team Trump, how does this work?
And that's what we're going to take a look at today, okay?
So just to recap on Vance, as we know, he is a full MAGA soldier.
And MAGA is defined by its emphasis on white identity and its demonization of communities of color.
And if you're still a listener who thinks that that's not what MAGA is about, we've been doing this for a better part of a decade now.
Go back, take a listen.
I think we've made that case a lot of times.
Feel free to reach out.
But I'm not going to defend that statement here, that it's defined by its emphasis on white identity.
We see that in the opposition to so-called wokeness.
We see it in the opposition to DEI initiatives.
We see it in the opposition to affirmative action.
And on and on and on, all of those things are aimed at preserving a society in which white people, especially white men, hold and maintain power.
Okay?
Project 2025!
I'm going to keep calling it.
It's the MAGA policy blueprint that Vance has endorsed.
It supercharges all of those elements of the MAGA movement.
Trump, for his part, has vowed to end birthright citizenship in the U.S., at least for those whose parents are in the U.S.
illegally.
That would not apply to Usha Vance, but that's a policy position that he's running on, is doing away with so-called birthright citizenship.
So it seems To lots of observers, including my friend who reached out, including other people who have reached out since then, it seems like quite the obvious contradiction that Vance holds the views that he does, is now the VP nominee for a GOP that increasingly serves as a white nationalist organization, and yet his family doesn't appear to follow the model of his own political movement.
And people on the left, in case people are like, you know, you people on the left, you're always fixated on race, you know, whatever.
No, we're not the only ones who've noticed this, right?
Multiple MAGA figures launched racist attacks against Usha Vance on social media following Trump's naming of Vance as his running mate.
Just a couple examples.
Jaden McNeil, who's the founder of the far-right America First Students, wrote on X, formerly Twitter, quote, I'm sure this guy is going to be great on immigration, end quote.
And he featured a picture of J.D.
and Usha Vance holding their newborn child.
So the idea being that, of course, because he married somebody who's not white, he's going to be weak on immigration.
Probably the most notable example of this—there were others, though—was Nick Fuentes.
And just a reminder of who Nick Fuentes is, he is a white supremacist who visited Mar-a-Lago.
He was hosted by Trump in 2022.
Trump later does his thing, where he's like, I didn't know who he was, and I didn't know anything about him, just, you know, had him there and had lunch, whatever.
But Nick Fuentes' statements were really telling in this.
He worried that Vance, quote, would not effectively defend white identity because of his wife's Indian heritage.
That's what he worried about.
On his podcast, he said this.
Who is this guy, really?
Do we really expect that the guy who has an Indian wife—pause here, just notice he doesn't say Indian-American—an Indian wife, she's a U.S.
citizen, she's an American, but if you're a Christian nationalist and you're not white, you're not really American, there it is, okay?
Back to the quote, do we really expect that the guy who has an Indian wife and name their kid Vivek is going to support white identity?
End quote.
The idea obviously being he's not going to support white identity, and for the Nick Fuenteses of the world who are part of the MAGA movement, That's what this is about, right?
And we're going to come back to Fuentes.
We're going to come back and we're going to look at how Vance, JD Vance, responds to this.
But that's the question that my friend reached out to me about.
That's the question I know others are wondering about.
I was on campus this week getting ready for a new semester, ran into some folks who asked me about this.
And the question is, how would someone like Vance square his own family with MAGA credentials?
I think it also brings up another question.
It's too broad to fully hit today, and I don't know that I'm really ever going to be in a position to get to it.
But it is a question that people also have, which is, how does an accomplished professional woman like Usha Vance appear on stage next to her husband, celebrated as Trump's heir apparent to the MAGA movement?
And of course, we know that she later also appears on conservative news sites to defend his cat lady statement and so forth.
Okay?
That's the question.
I have thoughts.
Before I share my thoughts, I want to be clear that I can't read J.D.
Vance's mind.
I don't know the guy.
It's not like we sit around and talk and I get to ask him, Hey, J.D., what's up with not being married to a white person?
But to borrow Kamala Harris's line, I know the type.
I know the MAGA type.
I know the rad, trad, Catholic type.
I know J.D.
Vance's type, and that type tells us a lot.
And so I think it gives us some insight into if one could have that conversation with J.D.
Vance of how it might work or the dynamics that are involved here.
And I think there are several dimensions to this.
I think that they're all operative.
I think they sort of overlap on each other.
So some of them are implied in others, but I think you can kind of tease them apart and begin to decode how it is that this guy can boldly assert all the MAGA claims he does when his own family and the people that presumably he loves very much seem to be Marginalized by that same ideology, okay?
So let's start with the most straightforward piece of this, which is just straight-up hypocrisy, okay?
Like his pretty new mentor Trump, Vance's national populism is just—it's simply hypocritical.
And it mirrors a hypocrisy at the heart of the MAGA movement, okay?
When it comes to Trump in particular, MAGA has always been a do-as-I-say, not-as-I-do kind of movement.
In other words, Trump—and I think this leaks down into the movement as a whole—has always been about telling people what they ought to do and what kind of people they need to be without actually being that kind of person or doing those kinds of things.
I've written about, in my book, I talk about how, for example, this supposedly anti-elitist movement, populism is almost always, it's articulated in anti-elitist terms, and many people in definitions of populism that I think are not accurate, but most people will say, oh, populism is about critiquing elites and so forth.
Sure.
This movement that presents itself as anti-elitist, that is in defense of, you know, kind of the common man, in particular the common white man.
That's why you have the gender disparities that you have in the manga movement.
It's led by a privileged billionaire who's never had to do anything blue-collar a day in his life.
A guy that will talk about grocery prices and things like that.
Trump's never bought groceries.
I don't think he's probably ever cooked his own meals.
And if you just wanted the quick example of this, it's on display in the really rambly kind of press conference he had where he was supposed to be hitting on the economy and rent prices and groceries.
He had like all the groceries on the table and all that.
Where was that?
It was in his private golf club in New Jersey.
So you have the billionaire politician, born with a silver spoon in his mouth, hanging out in his private golf club with groceries that he didn't buy and probably never has, trying to talk to the common person and be the spokesperson for that movement.
It's just a contradiction.
And we've talked endlessly about the moral failings of a guy who's the mouthpiece for Christian nationalism and the people who used to call themselves valued voters.
So with all that in view, I think it's no surprise that a new standard bearer for the far-right movement doesn't personally adhere to the preachings of that movement.
And after all, that's the privilege of powerful white men in America.
You get to hold other people to standards and make demands upon them that you yourself are not held to and demands that you don't have to meet.
Right?
So that's the most straightforward piece of this.
It's just straightforward hypocrisy, but it's not unique to Vance.
It's a defining feature of the MAGA movement.
Okay?
The second one, and we've talked about this some in the show as well, is that Vance just doesn't have firm personal convictions.
We've seen that he's actually pretty new to the MAGA movement.
And not just like, he wasn't like MAGA curious and then like went on.
He was like critical of Trump and then jumps, you know, both feet headfirst.
I just mixed my metaphors.
Just dives into the MAGA pool after initially opposing it.
He is, as we've talked about and Brad has looked at really in depth, he's a champion of a radical traditionalist Catholicism, but he's a recent convert, right?
And it's obvious to me, if you kind of look at the history of Vance, as I understand it, you read his own book, that he's been influenced by whichever the way the wind blows and whichever direction will carry him to the greatest power and prestige.
And right now that's MAGA and radically traditional Catholicism.
Just a side prediction, if Trump doesn't win...
The election in November.
I think eventually you're going to see Vance go some radically different direction and talk about how he was never into MAGA.
He never supported that.
Whatever.
But that's me trying to read a crystal ball.
That's neither here nor there.
Okay?
So yeah, now that's MAGA and radically traditional Catholicism.
But when he met Usha Vance—oh, she was not Usha Vance at the time.
When he met her at Yale—I want everybody to remember that hypocrisy, elitism, whatever.
When he met her at Yale Law School, that's not who he was.
And I think it's clear that he, as an individual, is not going to let a little thing like being married to a woman of color who could be hurt by MAGA ideology, a little thing like having children of mixed ethnicity who could be hurt by MAGA ideology, he's not going to let something like that prevent him from holding political and religious views.
That are aimed at exactly those kinds of people.
I think it's worth noting here again Jennifer Aniston's like really on-point remarks about his opposition of fertility treatments for women as the father of daughters.
I think, you know, his elitist hypocrisy and I think his lack of personal conviction go hand in hand So that there's just simply no experience of contradiction when he, you know, looks at the family photo on the wall and when he looks out at America.
Okay?
So I think those are two big things.
I think those are two of the, let's call it kind of the low-hanging fruit, the easiest parts of the answer of how it is that J.D.
Vance might square his own family with his professed social ideology.
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But there's more to say about this.
But there's more to say about this.
There's another central element at the heart of Christian nationalism, and I think also at the heart of the specifically Catholic articulation of it that somebody like Vance gives to Christian nationalism, and that is this notion of proper social order.
Okay?
MAGA World will deny that it's a white supremacist movement, with exceptions like Fuentes notwithstanding.
They'll try to distance themselves from him, but most of them will say, no, no, no, this has nothing to do with white supremacy.
And they will say that there is a place for people of color and immigrants and so forth, and there is for them.
They will say that there is a place for immigrants and women and people of color within a MAGA society And there is a place, but here's the key.
Those groups are all allowed as long as they remain in their proper place, playing their proper role, which is in subservience to and service to powerful white men.
People of color are fine as service workers, or as cheap manual labor, or as entertainers, or as athletes, But they've got no business serving as president.
You just see the opposition to Obama.
Or running for president.
Those who call Harris the DEI candidate.
To give just a couple examples.
Women have a revered quote-unquote place within this ideology.
They will say, we value women so much more than anybody else.
But their value is as breeders.
They're valuable if they produce offspring.
Their value is as mothers.
And their value is as subservient supporters of their men.
That is their role.
And just think Harrison Butker and his speech that made so many waves.
It speaks right to this kind of ideology.
So yeah, there's a place for those kinds of people in this society.
And as long as they occupy their approved subservient place, they're okay.
Right?
So as long as Usha Vance is willing to play that role, she can find acceptance within most of the MAGA movement.
Fuentes notwithstanding, as long as she appears on Vance's arm at the the RNC, and as long as she defends his views on women in the family, she serves that role for him.
And I think it's worth noting here that this isn't new to her.
And this new MAGA position that she's in serves her own interests.
She has her own history of serving the interests of the right.
And I think that that's important to acknowledge.
Again, she's an accomplished Yale School law grad, but she clerked for none other than Brett Kavanaugh when he was an appeals court judge in D.C.
She later went on to clerk for Chief Justice John Roberts.
So she has her own history on the political and judicial.
She, like her husband, has actively sought prestige and power.
You don't get those kind of clerkships without a lot of behind-the-scenes working, and there's some great stuff out there about that.
Maybe we'll get to talk about that more in the future.
And now she's adopting the role of MAGA wife so that she can get that, right?
She has stepped down from her position as a trial lawyer with the law firm Munger, Tullis & Olson.
It's situated in D.C.
and nowhere else than San Francisco, so she's from the West Coast, or, you know, people could accuse her of being so.
So, at least for now, she is willing to occupy that MAGA-approved space and role for women.
And as long as she stays in that space, She stays in her proper place, as long as she does that, that she can have a place at the table.
And I think that this goes for her family as well.
As long as they are there to celebrate and affirm and elevate JD Vance, that's a MAGA-approved role.
And so we can turn a blind eye to the obvious fact that they're not white, which is an issue for lots of MAGA folks, okay?
And that brings me to the last piece that I think we need to talk about, or that we have time to talk about, about how Vance might square this, or how he's able to not experience the contradiction that so many people see when they look at him on the stage of the RNC.
And this is the colorblind ideology that we find on the right.
And I've talked about this in other contexts, other episodes on the Weekly Roundup and so forth.
I don't want to repeat all of that here, okay?
I don't want to belabor that point.
But what we're talking about is the refusal on the right to ever even acknowledge that race is an issue.
It's like the two options you have are explicit white supremacy or this literally unbelievable denial that anybody on the right even sees race.
And I think that this was on display in J.D.
Vance's really clunky and awkward response to Fuentes' attacks.
I said we would come back to his response, and so now we're here.
Initially, I think it's worth noting, he didn't even condemn the attacks.
But eventually, he says this on Megyn Kelly's show.
This is what he said.
I just want to walk us through it, take a couple minutes here.
He said, look, I love my wife so much.
I love her because she's who she is.
Obviously she's not a white person and we've been accused, attacked by some white supremacists over that.
I just want to pause there.
I find this response a little weird.
It's like, it's not obviously she's like Indian-American.
It's like she's not a white person.
He's already tacitly acknowledging The concern, the weakness, the way that it would be an affront to some that she's not a white person.
He's giving some tacit legitimation to that in the way that he doesn't affirm her in a positive identity.
He only notes her negative identity.
Yes, she's not white.
Okay?
But he goes on to say this.
And I want to hold that because, I mean, you get this kind of brief acknowledgment that she's not white.
Race almost comes clearly to the surface here.
We can kind of see it.
But then he goes on to say this.
He says, I just I love Usha.
She's such a good mom.
She's such a brilliant lawyer, and I'm so proud of her.
But yes, her experience has given perspective on the way in which it's really hard for working families in this country.
End quote.
The issue of her racial identity, the basis of the attack, completely disappears from his response.
He has to, instead, reframe his affirmation of her into a kind of MAGA, radical, traditional, Catholic-approved framework.
So it's not that there's some value to her.
No, I love her.
His masculine pride and affirmation is why she's acceptable.
I love her.
She's such a brilliant lawyer, and I'm so proud of her.
This is about J.D.
Vance.
It's not about Usha Vance.
It's about J.D.
Vance.
I approve her so she's acceptable.
Right?
And then he goes on to say, yes, her experience has given me some perspective.
I think a regular person, somebody who's not kind of weird about race, like Vance, is a regular person.
I say her experience as the daughter of immigrants.
Her experience as an Indian American, her experience as a minority, her experience as—one might expect that that's what's going to figure here, but what does he do?
Her experience has given me some perspective on the way in which it's really hard for working families in this country.
Let's just pause for a minute real quick on this perspective into working families.
I think most people when they hear working families have a certain conception in mind.
And again, this goes to, in my view, the hypocrisy of the MAGA movement.
So yeah, Usha has given me such a perspective into how hard it is for working families.
Her parents moved to the U.S.
late 1970s.
They teach engineering and molecular biology.
Her father and grandfather both taught or studied at the Indian Institute of Technology, which is India's premier engineering college.
Her younger sister is a mechanical engineer with a semiconductor company in San Diego.
The point here is that he presents this as if not only is he going to deny the significance of like racial identity here, but no, he's going to say it's really hard for working families in this country.
Folks, I don't mean to make light of like the work that her family probably has put into achieving what they've achieved.
But this is not the experience of lots of American quote-unquote working families.
So, Vance, again, the hypocrisy of the MAGA movement, the privilege that refuses to acknowledge its privilege, but the insight he says he's gained from it is about working families.
He makes it about that.
He is literally defenseless against the racist attack against his wife because he's not supposed to talk about race.
And so we see it as he fumbles through this response and actually doesn't address the point of contention with other MAGA folks.
And part of the reason, of course, is because he can't.
You can't be a consistent MAGA person and defend pluralism, religious pluralism, ethnic pluralism.
You just can't.
It goes against the inner logic of American Christian nationalism.
I have to wrap this up, not least of which because I'm getting really, really worked up.
But I think those are some of the pieces that fit together, ranging from, again, just blatant hypocrisy to the colorblind ideology that dominates discourse on the right at present.
To many observers, to you, to me, to my friend who reached out to me, to people I've talked to, to white supremacists, J.D.
Vance's family is a walking contradiction of his MAGA beliefs and values, okay?
I'm trying to highlight what I think are the mechanisms within that contemporary Christian nationalism and radical traditional Catholicism that allow Vance to either miss this—I really don't know if he seriously doesn't see the contradiction or if he's just trying to mask it.
I really, honest to goodness, don't know where he's at in that, and it doesn't matter.
The effects are the same.
I think it's also always important to remember, and this highlights this, that human beings and groups are not math equations.
They don't have to balance out.
We often talk about somebody being contradictory in their identity or something, and the fact of the matter is we embody contradictions all the time, and this is one of those cases.
It is simply a contradiction of his stated religious and political ideals.
And I would say of the stated religious and political ideals of his running mate to affirm the constitution of his family, but there we have it.
That's how it is, okay?
And one final point that's worth noting here is an irony that I think is really significant.
His refusal or inability to acknowledge his family's complex identity, it actually robs the Trump campaign of what could otherwise be a really powerful counterbalance To the personal narrative of Kamala Harris and her own story as the daughter of immigrants.
But because of their colorblind ideology, because they can't affirm that, they can't foreground that, they can't tell that story within a kind of MAGA framework, and it actually robs the Trump campaign of what I think could actually be a positive use, a positive resource for them, provided by J.D.
Vance.
And I think that we saw a similar limitation in Nikki Haley, in her short-lived attempt to win the GOP presidential nomination.
Again, because she had to win over The MAGA faithful, she was in the position of either not having to tell that story about who she is, or if she did, running the risk of alienating them, and we see that.
I've got to sign off here.
Going longer than normal.
Thank you for listening.
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Please feel free to reach out with ideas, questions, clarifications, Daniel Miller Swag, danielmillerswaj at gmail.com.
