What JD Vance’s Eruption of Rage Over Usha and El-Sayed Really Reveals

I don’t know how the politics of all this will play for El-Sayed. His approach is undoubtedly provocative. My suspicion is that Vance’s real goal here is to tie El-Sayed down in disputes that remind people of his Muslim heritage, on the theory that this can only hurt him.

Indeed, there may be no easy way to invoke Usha Vance that works politically for El-Sayed. Perhaps he needs to reach for a somewhat higher tone, a loftier register, to get these points across most effectively. One possibility might be for El-Sayed, who has two daughters, to say something like this: JD, every time Trump and MAGA attack my family’s religion and smear my wife for wearing a hijab, they are attacking your wife and kids, too.

That has the virtue of highlighting the truth: Vance has made vile accommodations with gutter white nationalists of all stripes. Given Vance’s undisguised desire to be seen as a towering moral and intellectual figure, you’d expect him to ruminate just a tad on how he and his movement are treating El-Sayed and his family. But in the end, he almost certainly won’t judge his white nationalist allies harshly for a fairly simple reason: He largely agrees with them.