On Wednesday, Meghan McCain interviewed Second Lady Usha Vance on her podcast, Citizen McCain. It was “journalism” in the way a lot of these shows are: McCain, daughter of John McCain and a former co-host of The View, relentlessly lobbed softballs about Vance’s cooking, childrearing, fashion, and home décor. There was very little acknowledgement that Vance is a former litigator with two Yale degrees who has—by various accounts—been quite influential on her husband, one of the most powerful men in the world.
Vance presumably has her own political opinions, which are perhaps complex and interesting. She’s clerked for Chief Justice John Roberts and for Brett Kavanaugh before he ascended to the US Supreme Court. But she was also once registered as a Democrat and was reportedly “appalled” by Donald Trump. Fifty-five minutes into their hour-long interview, when McCain apologetically teed up a question about the “elephant in the room,” it seemed like this dissonance might finally be addressed. But actually, McCain was inquiring about the possibility of Vance becoming First Lady someday. (Vance was tepid but polite: “In a dream world, eventually I’ll be able to live in my home and continue my career and all those sorts of things,” she said.)
The interview is an odd artifact from MAGA-world. Vance, 39, is poised and understated, thoughtful and serious. She doesn’t dodge questions, though she’s never asked any tough ones. The aura is quite different from her husband’s: it’s not Mountain Dew and four-wheelers and Catholic doctrine and the 4-H livestock show. It’s more Khan Academy and piano lessons and balanced meals. Vance comes off as fairly effete. Here are some takeaways—many frivolous, some not.
Vance dreads the limelight but braves it to go to Pilates
“One of the things that’s kind of difficult about this life is that you’re constantly set apart,” Vance lamented of being Second Lady. She doesn’t like “the security element, where you enter through weird back doors to get into a restaurant,” or the “public element, where people are socially distant from you in various ways.” She seems to find it weird to be called “ma’am” (“nobody ever called me ma’am before this”), and she admits that she and her husband sometimes walk the streets in disguise. (Apparently, donning hats substantially reduces the number of people who recognize them.)
Vance spoke of her aspiration to “just be a millennial person living in the world, as opposed to some sort of figure on television.” It’s a bit odd, since the Vances are rarely spotted off the grounds of the US Naval Observatory where they live. (By contrast, Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff seemed to be everywhere.) But Vance claims that she tries each day to live a normal life—to “forget that people are watching,” despite “maybe being photographed by someone”—particularly by going to the gym. As someone who’s “not a natural exerciser,” she apparently takes a lot of workout classes: Pilates, hot yoga, high-intensity interval stuff. No word on where she works out.
McCain’s strange pregnancy reveal
The thing about McCain’s style of journalism is that almost every question was about her own life: She asked whether Vance had pregnancy or postpartum complications, because she herself had them. She asked how Vance keeps her children normal, because she herself comes from a political family. But 20 minutes into this interview, McCain outdid herself. “I hope you don’t mind, but I wanted to let you in on something that’s private that I haven’t talked about publicly yet,” she said, before revealing to Vance that she’s currently pregnant with her third child—virtually guaranteeing that all coverage of this rare conversation with a notoriously reticent public figure would also encompass the interviewer’s personal life. “I know it’s a weird way to announce it,” McCain acknowledged. Vance graciously called her news “wonderful.”
Vance is not a tradwife
The pregnancy reveal segued into a question, of sorts: McCain said she “keeps reading all this horrible data” about how three is the worst number of children to have, and then asked Vance to “tell women in America” why that particular family size is great. It was an opportunity for the Second Lady to lean into the pronatalism of the MAGA and MAHA right: to tell women why bigger families are better, and why mothers (as her husband has notoriously said) are more fulfilled than the childless cat ladies clawing their way up corporate ladders and trying to run this country into the ground.
Vance did not take that bait. “I love having three kids; I’m a huge proponent of it,” she said, adding that, “obviously people want to have different family sizes for different reasons.” Mentioning that JD sometimes wants a fourth child, Vance seemed to dismiss the possibility; she laughed and said, “We’ll see where that leads.”
For a while, JD seems to have followed his wife’s career
In one of the interview’s more intriguing moments, Vance described a conversation between JD and one of his law school professors (Amy Chua, of course) that set the tone for their early careers. JD was apparently having “a little bit of a crisis about why he was in law school at all”—chasing professional success without really understanding why, and Chua urged him to think about it differently. “Your heart is not in doing that,” Chua apparently said. “You really love Usha. Make decisions that maximize your happiness in that way.” JD, in Vance’s telling, was “really amazing about this,” which meant that “we were able to follow some of my legal career’s twists and turns geographically.” It sure sounds like she’s saying that JD—who seems to desire a return to traditional gender roles—followed her career in the early years of their relationship, not the other way around.
Vance chooses outfits via group text
Prior to her life as Second Lady, Vance said, she “always tried to have a pretty small wardrobe” and was not “the most fashionable person out there.” Asked if she now works with a stylist, she replied that she has a group text of assorted friends, one of whom works in the fashion industry. Apparently, the Second Lady has photographed everything in her closet and put it into an app so that her faraway text friends can mix and match various pieces to suggest ensembles. For this interview, Vance wore beige trousers, an off-white sleeveless top, and glossy white slingback heels. “I’m just doing the best that I can to feel like myself and not this Second-Lady figure,” she said.
JD bakes cakes
Apparently, when the Vances first met, “JD didn’t know how to cook a thing. There was some chicken dish he could make and really nothing else.” But after realizing that his new girlfriend was a vegetarian—and that he “had no idea what a vegetarian diet would look like”—JD apparently went to Usha’s mom for some cooking lessons. Now, according to Vance, her husband has “mostly transitioned to baking.” Apparently he makes good biscuits. Recently, he’s been “taking up cakes.”
Vance takes German lessons and keeps her kids off screens
So what does an Ivy League graduate and former Supreme Court clerk do with her chill-ish Second-Lady life? Vance described various “self-improvement projects”: taking German lessons, reading a backlog of books, and making toys for her kids. “I do try to have these personal projects that are just fundamentally unrelated to anything in politics,” she explained.
Of course, Vance also has a public role—and so far, she’s taken up the cause of literacy. “Literacy scores have been dropping,” she told McCain; kids are “reading less, and are able to read less to begin with.” To address this, Vance recently announced a summer reading challenge, to try to get American children off screens and reading books. Elsewhere, she told McCain that she and JD do not let their young children use tablets on planes, despite doing a fair amount of international travel. (“Honestly, we just sort of accepted that sometimes it was going to be sort of a disaster,” she said.)
Overall, Vance seems on board
As expected, Vance did not give the impression that there was any daylight between herself and her husband. This was not Melania slapping the President’s hand away or writing a book about how she supports abortion rights. Vance appeared to be very much the devoted wife. That seems completely plausible; plenty of reporting has suggested that Vance’s liberal views have drifted rightward in recent years. But on the other hand, as the vice president joked to a crowd back in March, whenever “the cameras are all on, anything that I say—no matter how crazy—Usha has to smile and laugh and celebrate it.”
