Usha Vance reveals how she deals with negative press coverage of her husband
Sen. JD Vance's wife, Usha Vance, revealed how she deals with negative press coverage of her and the Vance family after her husband was chosen as Donald Trump's running mate during an exclusive interview with "Fox & Friends."
"That can be hard. And, you know, sometimes I don't see it all, and sometimes I do see it and I look at and think, well, this is not the JD I know, this is not accurate. And other times it might span discussions or thoughts about what we should do next or how we should live. But I think we've been doing this now for a little while, and I've gotten kind of accustomed to it and grown a bit of a thick skin to it. And so I just try to not let it affect the way that I live," Vance told Fox News' Ainsley Earhardt in an interview airing Monday.
Trump chose the Ohio senator as his running mate in last month. Vance has been subjected to an intense drumbeat of negative coverage in the weeks since and has a negative net favorability rating.
Vance also said she's gotten a lot of good advice from their friends about how to deal with the press.
"One really good piece of advice that someone gave me is just not to read the news that much, and it's not burying your head in the sand or anything like that. It's just JD is out there. He's talking about all sorts of things. He's thinking all sorts of things and I just think he deserves to have someone in his life who hears it straight from him and doesn't just hear what other people are saying about him all the time. And so I think that really helps," she said.
Earhardt also asked about Vance's "childless cat ladies" remarks in 2021, which have come under sharp criticism and portrayed as attacks on all women who don't have children. Sen. Vance has said he was taken out of context.
"I took a moment to look and actually see what he had said and try to understand what the context was and all that, which is something that I really wish people would do a little bit more often. And the reality is he made a quip in service of making a point that he wanted to make that was substantive, and it had actual meaning," Usha Vance said of the comments.
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Asked about what she would say to anyone offended by her husband's comments, Usha told Earhardt that her husband "would never, ever, ever want to say something to hurt someone who was trying to have a family, who really, was struggling with that."
"He made that clear at the time. And he's made that clear today. And we have lots of friends who have been in that position. It is challenging and never, ever anything that anyone would want to mock or make fun of, and I also understand there are a lot of other reasons why people may choose not to have families, and many of those reasons are very good," she added.
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Usha and JD Vance married in 2014 and have three children.