Second Lady Usha Vance had a choice when a Democratic Senate candidate pulled her into a fight over Sharia law by invoking her husband’s late grandfather. She answered not with outrage but with a story about the Ohio family that raised him. In a preview clip posted August 25, 2026, ahead of her full “Fox & Friends” interview, Vance responded to a weekend swipe from Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic Senate nominee in Michigan — a comment that critics denounced as racist.
The nominee’s post came after Vice President JD Vance criticized his embrace of Sharia law. El-Sayed implied that such a practice would have seemed alien to the vice president’s grandfather, James Vance, the man JD Vance refers to as “Papaw.” “So do we think JD is taking Usha with him back in time to meet Papaw,” El-Sayed wrote, in what appeared to be a reference to the second lady’s Indian ethnicity.
A Laugh, Then a Family Story
“I have to admit I kind of laughed,” she said of the post. The second lady acknowledged that she had indeed never met her husband’s mamaw and papaw, who died several years before she and JD Vance met at Yale Law School in 2010.
Still, she said, she knows and loves the children that couple raised — her husband’s mother, aunt and uncle — all of whom, she said, have shown her nothing but affection, with his aunt serving almost as a second mother to her. Parents who raised children like that, she said, must have been loving people themselves, and she said she would have liked very much to meet them.
Her Unexpected Welcome in Ohio
Before she began dating her future husband, Vance said, she had never been to Ohio, a state she said upended the assumptions she brought with her. She called it culturally diverse and said its people had been welcoming and loving toward her, treating her as one of their own family.
Her reply, offered calmly, is likely to shape coverage of an interview that also ranges across motherhood, literacy and life with a sitting vice president. Other clips from the sit-down touch on her focus on reading and the best advice she has offered her husband. The full interview was set to air Wednesday on “Fox & Friends,” beginning at 6 a.m. ET.
A Fight That Started Over Sharia Law
The clash traces back to the vice president’s argument that the Democratic Party has drifted from the voters who once formed its base. Campaigning in Ohio earlier in the week, JD Vance pointed to El-Sayed’s past remarks linking criticism of Sharia law to white supremacy, casting them as proof that Democrats have abandoned their working-class roots.
He made the case through his own family. His grandfather worked as a welder for 40 years and voted Democratic, the vice president said, because he considered it the party of union men. Vance said he would like to travel back in time and tell his papaw that a man who claims to speak for working people not only supports Sharia law but brands its critics white supremacists — and that this is not his grandfather’s Democratic Party. Vance has credited the elder Vance as a stabilizing and influential presence during his childhood.
Republicans Amplify the Backlash
Republicans seized on El-Sayed’s post over the weekend. Rep. Brandon Gill, R-Texas, questioned why El-Sayed — whom he identified by his full name, Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed — would assume that all white Midwestern grandparents are racist. The line rippled across conservative media and kept the exchange alive into the week.
El-Sayed, meanwhile, has been absorbing questions about his record. In an August 25 television appearance he was pressed on Sharia law in Michigan, and in other segments he faced questions about his past statements on Sharia law and white supremacy and about his plans to tax the rich, defending his wealth tax proposal. A Michigan GOP lawmaker publicly cast doubt on El-Sayed’s denial that he is a socialist, arguing his policy platform tells a different story.
The Michigan Senate race has already turned personal, and the involvement of the vice president — who has made El-Sayed a foil in his own campaign travel — has drawn a national audience to a state-level fight. What the preview clip suggests is that the second lady, who rarely engages in that arena, is willing to answer when the attack lands on her.
Usha Vance and JD Vance appeared together at a White House event in May. Her response this week arrives in a different register: not a rebuttal from a podium, but a shrug, a story about her in-laws and an insistence that Ohio welcomed her.