Two months ago, Vice President JD Vance urged Department of Government Efficiency head Elon Musk to “bring back” Marko Elez, a staffer who once posted “normalize Indian hate” on social media.
“I obviously disagree with some of Elez’s posts, but I don’t think stupid social media activity should ruin a kid’s life…So I say bring him back,” Vance wrote on February 7.
Soon afterward, Democratic Representative Ro Khanna, who is Indian, shot back at the vice president.
“Are you going to tell him to apologize for saying ‘Normalize Indian hate’ before this rehire? Khanna wrote on X soon after the vice president’s initial post. “Just asking for the sake of both of our kids.”
Now, Second Lady Usha Vance — who is Indian-American — has responded to the incident.
In an interview with Usha Vance, The Free Press asked for her views on the row between her husband and Khanna. While the Second Lady said she hadn’t seen “the entirety” of the exchange, she still condemned the post.
“Do I think it’s great when people talk about ‘normalizing Indian hate’ or something like that? Absolutely not. I think it’s terrible,” she said.
She went on to note that racist rhetoric is nothing new, but the way that it’s spread on social media is: “I think it’s our relationship to this information…that is potentially new.”
“Very, very intelligent people say things that are sometimes very, very ill-founded because we are now in this world in which all conversations happen based on limited information very quickly, without the kind of reflection that might have been possible before,” she added.
Usha Vance, the first nonwhite Second Lady, also shared what life has been like as an Indian-American woman among MAGAworld’s litany of powerful white women, whom the interviewer described as blonde with “Botox and facelifts” wearing “low-cut blouses and nine-inch heels.”
“I’m laughing because it would be really hard for me to be blonde,” Usha Vance told The Free Press, noting, “that color would look totally absurd.”
“For what it’s worth, my reception into this world—and I’m not from a particularly wealthy background, not from a very fashion-oriented background personally or professionally—has been really positive,” she added. “People don’t seem to care all that much what I look like.”
The Second Lady also addressed a recent visit to the Kennedy Center, where she and JD were booed as they entered for a concert.
“I don’t think we anticipated that anyone would really notice,” she said.
“It was about 20 or 30 seconds of some people booing and delaying the start of the concert, right as the conductor is about to come out, and there were a few other people clapping. JD waved at them, and then we enjoyed the show that we had come for,” she added.
Usha Vance added that her role in her husband’s life has been to offer support in a job she describes as “lonely.”
“I don’t know that he’s asking me for advice so much as, it can be a very lonely, lonely world not to share with someone,” she said.
“It’s a very strange life that we lead, where there are lots of people who have just imagined all sorts of narratives about us and what we think and what we do and why we do it and how much planning goes into it and all these sorts of things,” she added.
The post Usha Vance was asked about JD calling for rehiring of DOGE staffer who posted ‘normalize Indian hate.’ Here’s how she responded appeared first on The Independent.
