The Skinny | By Joan Zwagerman

I’ve been thinking a LOT about Usha Vance. Her husband is the vice-president and he has said a hurtful thing and behaved shamefully in public. I wrote a letter I will never send.

Dear Mrs. Vance:

Usha, may I call you Usha? You’ve been on my mind this week, and I wonder how you are doing.

At the University of Mississippi on October 29, your husband walked on stage and into an overly warm embrace with Erika Kirk, widow of Charlie Kirk. The full-body, full ma’am-slam caused a kerfuffle and with right.

That “hug” had a lot of people speculating that perhaps there was a little some’in’, some’in’ going on between the two. I’m not saying that there is, but it wasn’t appropriate, and it was disrespectful to you.

People know very little about you because you neither seek nor need the spotlight. How refreshing, especially in Washington, DC, City of Egos.

I believe that you are a good mother. I know that you are a good lawyer who worked in a progressive law firm that focused on gender and racial diversity in hiring.

You are a former Democrat. I have read that politics holds no interest for you.

I also believe that you love your husband. Crazy as this sounds, I can even imagine him being loving and tender because he demonstrated that pretty well in Mississippi.

Dude needs to remember “time and place” and to dance with the one that “brung ya.”

Dude also needs to respect differences.

I’m speaking, of course, about the fact that he’s a newb Catholic and you are Hindu and that he wants you to come over to his side. He said, in Mississippi that day, that he hopes you will “be moved by the same thing that I was moved by in church.”

Again, Dude needs to remember “time and place.” On a stage, in front of political strangers is neither the time nor the place.

In an interview to the New York Times a year ago, your husband said:

“I feel terrible for my wife because we go to church almost every Sunday, unless we’re on the road.

Does she go with you? She does.

Has she converted? No she hasn’t. That’s why I feel bad about it. She’s got three kids. Obviously I help with the kids, but because I’m kind of the one going to church, she feels more responsibility to keep the kids quiet in the church. And I just felt kind of bad. Like, oh, you didn’t sign up to marry a weekly churchgoer. Are you OK with this? And she was more than OK with it, and that was a big part of the confirmation that this was the right thing for me.”

Let me understand here: The right thing for HIM is for YOU to go to church and make sure the kids don’t make too much noise.

And on Wednesday, he thought that the right thing for you would be to go to Catholic classes.

It’s really none of his business what you do with your spiritual life, and of course, you know that.

I look at you and see an intelligent and accomplished woman. I still remember your rapt attention in Washington Cathedral on January 22 as Bishop Mariann Budde spoke directly to the president, asking him to show mercy toward our immigrant neighbors.

She was trying to teach him a little bit about the way of Christ, about what it really means to follow Jesus.

Instead, he and your husband behaved like fifth graders who needed Individualized Education Plans or IEPs. You on the other hand listened with your whole being. I’ll never forget that.

It’s clear by now that I don’t respect your husband. In fact, I think he’s dangerous for American politics, and as much as I do not like the president, I don’t want to see anything happen to him.

The current president is not a good leader, and he’s not in good health. He’s a puppet on the strings of Russ Vought¹ and Stephen Miller², but every now and then he cuts the strings and wanders off.

He usually does or says something terrible and something that’s always done for his personal benefit, but the fact that he can’t be completely contained is a weird saving grace.

Your husband is far smarter than the president, but he’s also nakedly ambitious, and he owes his soul to Peter Thiel³.

Your husband is at war with himself. He’s too willing to chase after power. Reuters reported that: “some Republicans suggested that [your husband] was ‘driven more by opportunism than ideology.’”

He said some high-flown things in an essay for the Catholic publication, “The Lamp,” in 2020, but those sentiments are not integrated into his personality.

Catholics have a long history of supporting social justice, of caring for the poor and oppressed, of welcoming the stranger as though the stranger were Christ.

He’s educated, your husband. He knows better, but his worse impulses win too often.

The way he badgered Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the White House in February was the behavior of a bully. A few days ago, your husband crowed about that exchange proclaiming that it was “probably the most famous thing I’ve ever done, or maybe ever will do.”

The bad behavior was egregious enough; the boasting about it, though, shows no remorse. This is not the way of someone who is trying to be like Christ.

Somewhere inside he wants to be good, but he also REALLY wants to be president, and he’s not honest with himself about that.

I’ll give him this: He confesses that he has anger issues. That’s a start. A lot of people do, especially these days.

Prayer and confession can help with that. So can meditation and therapy. Maybe your time would be better spent driving him to therapy than sitting in church minding your children so your husband doesn’t have to be bothered.

I wish we could be friends, Usha. Washington, particularly now, seems like it would be a hard place to find a friend, to have a good laugh or a good cry over a glass of wine or a lemonade, and I don’t see you having much in common with the First Lady.

Let me close by saying that no matter what happens, I hope you can remain true to yourself.

Wishing you the best from afar,

A Midwestern Fan

Joan Zwagerman invites you to Google “Erika Kirk JD Vance” and see the photo for yourself. Make up your own mind about that embrace.

¹ Russell Vought, Director of the US Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and chief architect of Project 2025. He’s an unapologetic Christian nationalist.

² Stephen Miller, Homeland Security Adviser. He supports separating detained families. He is Jewish. Talk about a man at odds with himself and his history.

³ Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal and Palantir Technologies. He is a Christian and mentored JD Vance. Lately, Thiel has been talking A LOT about the Antichrist and has posited that climate activist Greta Thunberg could be the Antichrist.