Usha Vance On Faith, Family, And Changing Diapers In The White House

WASHINGTON — Alec Neel Vance came into the world two months ago in July, and he already has a Secret Service detail all his own.

Baby Alec’s parents, Vice President JD Vance and Second Lady Usha Vance, have said that they want to raise him, like all their children, as a man of purpose, not a child of political privilege. It’s no small task for a boy whose crib is in the Naval Observatory, and who may take his first steps in the White House.

The high-wire act of balancing the political world and real family life was on full display when I walked into Usha Vance’s office on a sunny September afternoon. The Second Lady greeted me with a big smile, “baby-wearing” little Alec in a carrier strapped to her chest. Less than two months after giving birth, Usha was back in her office in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, eager to share the results of her summer reading challenge. 30,000 children had signed up, she told me, double the number that her pilot program brought in last year.

Clad in a white button-down, a skirt, and high-heeled pumps, she remained standing for our entire interview, occasionally strolling around the room to keep Alec happy. She joked that my audio recording would be punctuated by the sounds of her patting the baby’s bottom when he got fussy.

“Newborns all have their moments of being a little bit more challenging, but we’re feeling very lucky,” she said, looking down at the fuzzy head resting on her chest. “He is a fourth baby and seems to really have absorbed that fact, so he’s making it pretty easy on us by comparison.”

“There’s plenty of time, though, for him to get really tough,” Usha laughs. “I’m sure he’ll have something that makes us tear our hair out eventually. He is a little boy!”

And, of course, there are some … logistical differences with this newborn.

“He has a Secret Service detail. None of our newborns had that before,” Usha Vance tells me. “It’s sort of an absurdity because he’s always attached to me. He’s never anywhere far from me.”

Not since the Kennedys has a young family in politics so captured the nation’s attention. Alec Vance is the first child born to a sitting vice president in 150 years, joining his siblings — nine-year-old Ewan, six-year-old Vivek, and four-year-old Mirabel — as the Vance family travels around the world. Viral footage often captures the Vance kids clutching their stuffed animals on the walk from Marine Two to Air Force Two, yawning when they grow weary of an Oval Office visit or Inaugural address, or happily surveying history from over their father’s shoulder.

Like all parents, the Vances wondered how their other kids would react to Alec’s arrival. Mirabel’s place as the baby of the family has “been a part of her identity,” Usha says. But her fears that Mirabel would “balk a little at losing her stature” were quickly assuaged.

“She seems to think that she has gotten a promotion, so she’s really into it.”

The boys are just as doting, Usha says, with Ewan in particular begging her to carry Alec in the baby carrier and more.

“He is absolutely enamored of his brother,” she says. “He wants to do everything for him. He’s always trying to hold him; he burps him.”

With all her children, Usha Vance has pushed to get out and about almost immediately after giving birth, a resolve that often ends with her feeding babies on park benches or changing diapers in “all sorts of odd situations.”

With her husband just a heartbeat away from the presidency, the “odd situations” she faces with Alec are, well, odder. Naturally, I had to ask about the craziest place she had changed a diaper recently.

“There have been a couple of restaurant bathroom floors where they unexpectedly didn’t have any changing tables,” she said before her eyes settled on the desk in front of her. “This desk here. I think the floor of JD’s office once!”

No one was watching her every move for the first three, Usha explained, thinking back on her time before her husband became vice president.

“It’s different to wonder whether people are watching when you’re struggling with some of the things that any parent of any newborn struggles with. But people have been really wonderful about it. Either they don’t notice me because I think it’s sort of an unexpected thing to be in their bagel shop or coffee shop or library or whatever — they’re not looking for me in that kind of environment,” she explained. “And when they have noticed, it’s only been to be congratulatory, say something sweet about the baby, that sort of thing.”

The normalcy of these interactions may be a pleasant surprise, but the normalcy inside the Vance home is hard-won and carefully calibrated with the help of vice presidential staff.

“So many people who work in this office have been incredibly dedicated to making sure that [JD’s] time as a father is protected,” Usha said. “He obviously makes that his priority, and he’s made that clear to people. But then they go out of their way to make sure that he can be there at breakfast.”

“It’s basically the same JD who was the father of the first three is the father of the fourth, and he’s just as involved. It just takes a little army behind him to make that possible.”

“He’s been making a lot of breakfasts,” Usha tells me. “There have been several mornings when I haven’t seen our older children before they go to school because he’s handled all of that, and the baby and I are trying to catch up on sleep.”

On the morning of our interview, JD was home through all the school drop-offs, since Usha had her first few meetings out of the house since having the baby. He was the one taking the children out to feed the chickens that morning — at a custom coop designed to match the architectural style of the residence and not built using taxpayer dollars.

(Checking on the chickens and looking for eggs are part of the Vance kids’ chore chart, though the hens have yet to start laying eggs, leaving the children “consistently disappointed,” their mother says).

Chores are a big part of the Vances’ efforts to keep their kids grounded. Another is school.

It was important to the second couple that their children “were not cloistered away from the world, where the community was more reflective of the people who live in the area.” Teachers don’t treat the Vance children “as particularly special,” Usha adds, something for which she is incredibly grateful.

“We’ve been really happy with that. Their friends are from all walks of life. None of them are from political families or particularly wealthy or that sort of thing, none of their closest friends, and they just get treated like normal kids. They get really filthy at school on the playground … if they get in trouble, they get in trouble like any other kid.”

JD and Usha also sought out schools that would look at their children as “whole people,” she explained, as children who need to do more than just sit and stare straight at the blackboard every day.

It’s one reason they decided to send their kids to Catholic school — a detail often repeated in stories about the vice president’s faith, which his wife, a Hindu, does not share.

“One of the things that he committed to do, in discussion with me, was to raise his children Catholic,” she says. “And of course, I’m not Catholic, and the Catholic Church has all sorts of accommodations and expectations for people who are in mixed marriages. So I didn’t feel pressured in any way. It was just a decision that we came to do together.”

Usha describes her interfaith marriage as a “constant conversation.” She doesn’t feel pressure to change the way she thinks in order to conform to the way her husband thinks, and she doesn’t believe that JD feels any pressure from her to change his beliefs.

Rather than divide them, her husband’s Catholicism has just given them a new subject to talk about, Usha said. A convert himself, the vice president saw his children’s faith formation as an opportunity to continue his own.

“He thought the Catholic school might be one of the ways to bring this into family life and to learn about it together,” Usha says.

Unlike her husband, who chronicled his tumultuous Appalachian upbringing in the bestselling memoir “Hillbilly Elegy,” Usha Vance grew up comfortably in the suburbs of San Diego. JD Vance’s radically different life was something that drew Usha to him at Yale Law School — along with, she says, his kindness and gentleness, and how fun he was to be around.

He was, she told me, “the most interesting person” she knew. As they began to get to know one another, she always discovered something different about him in their conversations.

“There was always something else underneath, and I thought he was just an incredibly interesting person, and had ways of thinking about things I had not ever encountered before.”

The vice president frequently calls Usha his most trusted advisor and primary sounding board, and his enemies have taken note, firing shots at the vice president’s wife that often reference her race. Most recently, Michigan’s Democrat Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed taunted the vice president with the suggestion that his grandfather would not have embraced an Indian woman.

“So do we think JD is taking Usha with him back in time to meet Papaw, or no?” El-Sayed wondered in a social media post this month. JD Vance, who previously told El-Sayed to “keep my wife’s name the hell out of your mouth,” responded to the latest barb at the Republican Midterm Convention in Dallas, Texas.

“That is what he thinks of my grandfather — a man I loved, and who loved his family unconditionally,” the vice president said. “Abdul looks at him, sees the color of his skin, and decides that he could never have loved my wife.” He reminded the convention that El-Sayed was raised by his white step-grandparents and understands what a gift their love and care had been, yet still chose “to say that a man like my grandfather couldn’t have loved, from the bottom of his heart, someone who looks like Usha.”

“This is who the Democrats are now,” Vance argued in Dallas. “They aren’t the party of higher taxes and a little more regulation. They aren’t the party of FDR, or JFK, or even Bill Clinton. No — the Democrats are the party of hatred.”

Usha Vance doesn’t use social media — she doesn’t even have the login credentials for the accounts that promote her summer reading challenge, she says. But she’s aware of the public commentary on her marriage.

“It didn’t startle me that I had been brought into the conversation, because I feel like I’ve been brought into the conversation an awful lot over the last few years, from every conceivable angle, whether I’m participating in it or not, right?” she reflected.

On El-Sayed’s comments in particular, Usha is unbothered.

“I think it’s sort of sad that sometimes people’s imaginations can’t extend to see that people of very different backgrounds can have genuine respect and love for each other,” she said. “Even if they come from communities that are stereotyped in one way or another.”

She never got to meet JD’s grandfather, she says, “But I do know his children. I do know his grandchildren, and they have been nothing but kind and loving to me. And my feeling is that, that is a testament to the values that they received from their parents and grandparents.”

“So it is a regret of mine that I was never able to meet either JD’s Papaw or his Mamaw … and I’m not especially offended or upset that people make these comments.”

There will always be angry people who look for some kind of cudgel against their political enemies, she says, joking that she’s criticized for supporting her husband too much and not enough. Either JD doesn’t respect her different beliefs, she jokes, or she’s some kind of “evil power behind the throne” manipulating her husband.

I told her I had seen some critics describe her, somewhat forebodingly, as “strategic,” suggesting that perhaps she is craftily puppet-mastering her family’s future behind the scenes.

She laughed, saying that her cunning doesn’t extend outside the courtroom.

“I have no particular political knowledge or skills, so I don’t think my case-winning litigation strategies are super helpful in this setting,” she says.

Usha wasn’t present in Dallas when her husband delivered his address on the second night of the Republican Midterm Convention. The eyes of the political world were on Vance and his message that night, amid fevered speculation about the possibility that he would be the Republican Party’s 2028 presidential nominee. Usha stayed up late that night to watch the address on television, and she was watching when the crowd began chanting, “48, 48, 48!” to her husband.

When I asked her about it, she demurred — evidence, perhaps, that she’s picked up a bit more political acumen than she lets on.

“I saw his response, which I thought was funny and very apt,” she says, a reference to his insistence on focusing on this November’s election first. “Take things one step at a time in life. I think he’s exactly right.”

“You must have felt a certain way when the whole auditorium is chanting for your husband to be the next president,” I pressed her, and she opened up a little more.

“One of the really lovely things about his speech is that he was speaking from the heart about things he really cared about,” she said, “and people were responding to him in a way that showed that he was speaking right to them, right to their hearts as well, and that makes me really proud. It does.”

“Whether they’re chanting 48 or cheering really loudly for him, or responding on Twitter after to say that he told a story about life that really meant something to them, it makes me feel like he is doing something that is worthwhile,” Usha reflected. “He’s making people feel heard, and he’s showing that he really cares about their future, about making a better life for them.”

“And so that, that’s honestly what matters to me,” she said. “That’s the real answer.”

Usha Vance can’t predict what is in store for their family, nor can her husband. But as Washington buzzes and conservatives sort out who they will back in the next presidential bid, Usha is focused on making sure that her children have the possibilities that she had.

When she daydreams about the future of her family, her thoughts go first to their children — “what kind of people I would like them to be.”

“Of course, life is long and has many parts to it,” she said. “But that’s where my mind goes first.”

“I was actually just having lunch with a friend, and I was laughing with them that when we are confronted with decision after decision after decision about how to live with them in these roles, my lodestar is: what would my parents have done, in a suburb with sort of a modest income in the 1990s, with the intention of raising kids who were productive and happy citizens, who were able to have families and relationships that were meaningful?”

“And so when I look to the future, it is with an eye to making sure that they have those possibilities too, that they’re not terribly spoiled by the privileges of its existence, or that their sense of self and purpose and love for their family isn’t crushed by all the people who would really very much like to crush that for them, and that they can have the kinds of opportunities that I had.”

“That’s what I think about,” she says. “And it’s about finding a path through everything that we’re doing to make that possible.”