Why Melania Trump and JD Vance’s wife Usha have a lot in common

By Jill Filipovic, author of “OK Boomer, Let’s Talk: How My Generation Got Left Behind Oct. 31, 2024, 6:00 AM EDT

Who, exactly, is Melania Trump?

  1. sphinx-eyed former model came onto the political scene alongside her husband, former President Donald Trump,
  2. she’s been something of an enigma: often
  3. seemingly apolitical and
  4. largely silent
  5. has opaque motivations.
  6. doesn’t believe Trump’s politics were a deal-breaker — after all, she remains married to the guy. But she
  7. didn’t exactly seem enthusiastic about being in the political crosshairs, either.
  8. her very short memoir, with an all-black cover interrupted only by “MELANIA” printed in neat white block letters, promised to offer some insight:
    1. “into the life of a remarkable woman who has navigated challenges with grace and determination.”
    2. however, her autobiography offers no such insight
    3. difficult book to remark on
    4. it contains nothing remarkable.
    5. This is a book you can judge by its cover.
      1. “Melania” isn’t just boring
      2. it’s vapid.
  9. Perhaps Melania is vapid also
  10. Journalists have tried to profile her.
    1. interviewing
      1. friends
      2. family members
      3. people she grew up with
    2. trying to find anyone who can help them decode this cipher.
    3. Melania may be more stick figure than hieroglyphic;
    4. there seems to be no complex code to crack.
  11. Melania is exactly who she seems to be:
    1. a beautiful woman who has spent a long time trying to be beautiful
    2. found a rich man to take care of her.
    3. loves her son, Barron
    4. loves her parents (her mother recently passed away).
    5. likes expensive clothes and other luxuries.
    6. may not be an aggressively cruel person like her husband,
    7. doesn’t seem to be an ardently compassionate one, either.
  12. And that would be all fine and good had she
    1. stayed on the Upper East Side of Manhattan with her wealthy if boorish and allegedly philandering husband.
    2. But Trump’s foray in politics has dragged her in
      1. her decision to stand by his side.
      2. (even if she didn’t go to the trial stemming from his alleged dalliance with porn star Stormy Daniels during their marriage)
      3. is at the very least a symbol of her acceptance of his vulgarities and goals.
  13. She did get some headlines
    1. good and bad
      1. for using her memoir to voice public support for abortion rights just weeks before an election in which abortion is one of her husband’s weaker issues.
      2. this, too, seems less a statement of true independence and more one of cynical political game-playing
        1. her husband needs to rope in more female voters,
        2. many women are angry that he appointed Supreme Court justices who overturned Roe v. Wade. .
    2. In this sense, perhaps Melania and Donald aren’t so different.
    3. Neither are politically sophisticated or particularly attentive to policy.
    4. Neither evince much in the way of compassion or even interest in other people.
      1. Trump is angry and vitriolic, while Melania is purse-lipped and stoic
      2. Trump is emotionally incontinent1, while she often appears to be in emotional rigor mortis2;
      3. Trump is behaviorally uninhibited and says whatever he wants, while she is studiously reserved, perhaps because she has very little to say.
      4. But with both Trumps, what you see is what you get: There’s just not all that much there.

The Vances — JD, who is running for vice president, and Usha, who would be the second lady — are far more fascinating. But they, too, may be more transparent than the public would hope.

Usha:

  1. high-achieving daughter of highly educated immigrant parents
    1. who married a man whom she academically outperformed.
      1. JD, “Jon Boy”, was attracted to her intelligence;
      2. PJD even reportedly considered taking her last name
      3. being the primary caregiver for their kids.
        1. Now, he’s a different kind of guy
          1. one who rails against childless cat ladies
          2. “refer[s] to his children as belonging to Usha” (“She’s got three kids,” he recently said on a New York Times podcast).
    2. “often describes Usha as a ‘working mother’ – JD
      1. without implying that he himself has anything to juggle.
      2. He has come a long way from the would-be stay-at-home dad who put his wife’s career first.”
  2. Usha has clerked for conservative judges, including..
    1. federal appeals Judge Brett Kavanaugh, now Supreme Court Justice
    2. John Roberts, but she doesn’t seem particularly conservative (or political) herself.
  3. JD Vance once compared Trump to Hitler
    1. now he’s Trump’s highest-level lackey and
  4. Voiced his respect for ambitious women;
    1. now mocks professional women who delay or — for whatever reason — don’t end up giving birth.
  5. Vance did a little bit of time in the world of corporate law after law school
  6. Then moved into bigger-money venture capital
  7. published a finger-wagging memoir about his working-class Appalachian roots, writing about rural America il
    1. that appealed to moneyed coastal conservatives who wanted to believe that the poor and miserable immiserated themselves.
  8. When he decided to run for the Senate in Ohio, he was barely living in the state and had to quickly rebrand as a real working-class man — and one sympathetic to the MAGA movement.
  9. As VP, Vance’s wife Usha hasn’t adopted many of the aesthetics of the MAGA female
    1. but she has quit her job, joined her husband on the campaign
    2. stood by her man even as he demeans the sort of smart, well-educated, ambitious female archetype she very recently embodied.

The public wants the people in high office — and most people in the public eye, whether they are in politics or are celebrities of another kind:

  • to have depth. We want them to be decipherable, but we want
  • to believe they are special.

When they seem insubstantial or fueled by some silly and transparent motivation, we may assume there’s something they’re obscuring. If they’re at the top of their game, then there must be something there, right?

Maybe with these four — the Trumps and the Vances — that’s simply assuming too much. Perhaps they are exactly who they appear to be:

  1. The Trumps are superficial, intellectually shallow and money-obsessed.
  2. The Vances have principles that seemingly bend to their grand ambitions.

All four of these people have had enough time to show the public who they are. I suspect that what we see is exactly what we get.

  1. @RalphHightower: “emotionally incontinent”! That’s absolutely, fucking hilarious, and accurately describes Trump. ↩

  2. @RalphHightower: “emotional rigor mortis”! Emotionally dead and stiff! Absolutely, hilarious! ↩