This prominent GOP insider is struggling with their MAGA makeover

U.S. President Donald Trump waves as he boards Air Force One en route to Washington at Palm Beach International Airport in West Palm Beach, Florida, U.S., November 2, 2025. REUTERS/Elizabeth Frantz

When Donald Trump chose then-Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) as his running mate in the United States' 2024 presidential race, white nationalist and Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes was quick to attack Vance for being married to a non-white woman: Usha Vance, an Indian-American Hindu, accomplished attorney, and a vegetarian. Fuentes came right out and called the now-vice president a traitor to the white race — a statement that many liberals and progressives described as a MAGA firebrand saying the quiet part out loud.

Regardless, Usha Vance has tried to fit into MAGA World now that her husband is VP in the second Trump Administration. But The Guardian's Arwa Mahdawi, in her November 5 opinion column, argues that efforts to give Usha Vance a MAGA makeover are awkward and clumsy at best.

Usha Vance's background, Mahdawi stresses, doesn't make her a good fit for MAGA at all.

"Usha Vance is a very clever woman with terrible taste in men," the liberal Guardian columnist laments. "The Yale and Cambridge-educated lawyer quit her job at a prestigious DC firm the same day her husband was picked to be Donald Trump's running mate. She trailed after him on the campaign trail, smiling for the cameras. A former Democrat, she aligned herself with Trump, a man her husband once called 'America's Hitler.' In exchange for her loyalty, the second lady now has a taxpayer-funded mansion, regular trips in a private jet, and a husband who acknowledges white supremacist attacks on her — saying 'Don't attack my wife' — but has failed to condemn them head on."

Mahdawi adds, "Speaking during an event at the University of Mississippi last Wednesday, the vice-president said that he hoped his wife, raised in a Hindu household, would convert to Christianity. JD, by the way, used to be an atheist, then converted to Catholicism in 2019, saying he 'really liked that the Catholic Church was just really old.'"

The columnist, however, is critical of Usha Vance as well, describing her as someone who is "happy to trade her dignity for power."

"You know what seems disgusting, JD: saying that you hope the woman you married in a Christian-Hindu ceremony abandons something apparently important to her," Mahdawi writes. "Usha Vance is no victim. She's ambitious and a major force in JD's meteoric rise. She's just as implicated in America's slide towards autocracy and embrace of bigotry as he is. Still, you have to wonder if she has moments of doubt."

Arwa Mahdawi's full column for The Guardian is available at this link.

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