The mother of Vice President JD Vance says a chance run-in with Michigan’s Democratic Senate candidate would not stay polite. On the September 2, 2026, episode of the OutKick podcast “Tomi Lahren Is Fearless,” Beverly Vance Aikins told listeners she would probably take a swing at Abdul El-Sayed, the Democrat running for Senate in Michigan, if she ever crossed paths with him — then said in the same breath that she has no intention of doing anything of the kind.
The conversation ranged well past the campaign. A description of the episode says Beverly “opens up about her raw and inspiring personal journey,” taking in actress Amy Adams’ portrayal of her in “Hillbilly Elegy,” her “grueling battle with opiate addiction,” and what it took to “reclaim her nursing license, and rebuild her life.”
In another portion of the taping, written up September 5, Aikins addressed what she was paid for the “Hillbilly Elegy” movie and whether a sequel is possible.
Her line about throwing a punch capped a long defense of her son’s household. Tomi Lahren, 34, the show’s host and a co-host of Fox News’ “The Big Weekend Show,” opened the topic by noting how often the vice president, his wife and their children come up in the commentary of El-Sayed, 41. The Vance family, she said, is a subject the candidate keeps returning to.
“I think that man’s an idiot,” Aikins said. Of the couple’s four children, she said, “Those are my babies,” and she would do anything at all for any one of them. Few people she has ever encountered are as genuine, she added, as Second Lady Usha Vance, 40. “I love Usha as if she were my own daughter,” she said.
A further segment from the same episode, published September 7, has Aikins calling her daughter-in-law one of the nicest people she has ever met and telling Lahren that Usha is humble.
“I’d probably punch the guy if I’d ever seen him, and then that would get me in trouble,” Aikins said. The criticism angers her — “It makes me mad, honestly” — in part because El-Sayed has no idea what her son is really like. Even so, she told Lahren, “I’m not gonna do anything about it.”
Asked why opponents go after relatives, Aikins offered one word: jealousy. The vice presidency belongs to her son, 42, who also has a wife and four children, she pointed out. Nobody in the family gives the remarks any weight, she suggested, so El-Sayed’s jabs land nowhere.
What El-Sayed Said About the Family
Months of sharp commentary from El-Sayed, the Democratic nominee in Michigan’s 2026 midterm Senate race, preceded the exchange. On the podcast “The Allen Analysis Show” in April, he said Vance “has brown kids who he thinks are less American than everyone else,” adding: “Like, that’s wild to look at your own kids and be like you don’t actually belong as much in this country that I brought you into.” He went on: “Bro, it must break you every time you hug your own kids.” Another account of that appearance quotes a different line: “Can you imagine, he’s got brown kids, at some point he’s going to have a really awkward conversation with his kids, like, you made your career hating people who are different.”
A commentary piece published September 5 traced the origin of the dispute to a speech in which Vance said that if he went back in time to visit his “Papaw,” and described El-Sayed as “trying to run away from comments he made about Vice President J.D. Vance’s family.”
On August 22, El-Sayed returned to the vice president’s family history in a social media post: “So do we think JD is taking Usha with him back in time to meet Papaw, or no.” That message pulled the Vance family further into the campaign brawl.
Vance Answers at a Detroit Rally
The crowd at a rally in Sterling Heights, Mich., outside Detroit, on Monday, August 31, heard Vance answer head-on. He told them, “Keep my wife’s name the hell outta your mouth, because she’s way outta your league!”
The vice president pushed the point further from the same stage. “There is something about Abdul El-Sayed that is very, very evil and on the rise in the United States of America today,” he said, describing what he opposed as “people who see themselves, not as citizens of a common nation fighting for every single person, whether they’re Jewish or Christian, whether they’re white or Black or Brown, but see themselves as fighting for one group at the expense of others.” According to accounts of the rally, he also characterized El-Sayed as a man whose sympathy is reserved for “people who share his religion, but have nothing for people who don’t.”
A national argument over religion, identity and how far campaigns should go in talking about candidates’ spouses and children now has the Michigan contest at its center, a shift those remarks brought about.
El-Sayed Points to a Trump Post
Hypocrisy was the charge El-Sayed leveled at the vice president that night on CNN. Spouses were a subject he would rather leave alone, he said, before arguing that President Donald Trump had targeted his wife first. Trump posted side-by-side pictures on Truth Social in August pairing himself and the first lady with El-Sayed and his wife, Dr. Sarah Jukaku, who wears a hijab, under a caption reading “Two very different Americas.” “Donald Trump, almost as soon as I was nominated, tweeted a picture of me and my wife relative to him and his wife, trying to highlight the fact that my wife wears a hijab, as if to make an argument that that’s somehow less American,” El-Sayed said.
De-escalation is not on either side’s agenda. Vance pressed his case from the stage outside Detroit, El-Sayed carried his hypocrisy argument to CNN, and the vice president’s mother weighed in from a friendly podcast chair rather than a debate stage.
The episode touched on another family flashpoint as well: in a portion written up September 6, Aikins reacted to the vice president’s “childless cat ladies” spat with Taylor Swift.
For Aikins, the fight is less about policy than about the people in the family photos. Her grandchildren and her daughter-in-law were what her frustration circled back to, and she maintained that none of the attacks would rattle them — though she allowed that her own composure might not survive an encounter in person.