The One Man JD Vance Trusts Too Much

For whatever reason, he has a blind spot regarding Carlson -- a man who’s rallying voters against the president’s foreign policy, apologizing for supporting Trump in 2024, and suggesting that Donald Trump might be the Antichrist.

Scott Pinsker | June 16, 2026

Here’s a cynical, unfair political prediction: After the 2026 midterms -- but before the first GOP presidential primary -- JD Vance’s Hindu wife will announce her conversion to Christianity.

Which is a dreadfully unfair prediction, because Usha Vance has given us no reason to suspect her religious choices are anything but heartfelt. To insinuate otherwise is to assume that the Vances would exploit something as fundamental as their faith.

The fact that this idea even entered my head probably reveals something sad and broken about how my mind reconstructs reality. But I still think it’ll happen. Partly because of the language Vance uses when discussing his interreligious marriage:

So, we decided to raise our kids Christian. Our two oldest kids, who go to school, they go to a Christian school… Most Sundays, Usha will come with me to church… Do I hope, eventually, that she is somehow moved by the same thing that I was moved in by church? Yeah, honestly, I do wish that, because I believe in the Christian gospel and I hope eventually my wife comes to see it in the same way… Usha is closer to the priest who baptized me than maybe I am.

So, we decided to raise our kids Christian. Our two oldest kids, who go to school, they go to a Christian school… Most Sundays, Usha will come with me to church… Do I hope, eventually, that she is somehow moved by the same thing that I was moved in by church? Yeah, honestly, I do wish that, because I believe in the Christian gospel and I hope eventually my wife comes to see it in the same way… Usha is closer to the priest who baptized me than maybe I am.

And it’s partly because Vance is a politician -- and we shouldn’t underestimate a politician’s propensity for exploitation. (At least one veep candidate went as low as exploiting his kid’s corpse… repeatedly.)

But it’s also because Vance is noticeably reticent to criticize the Groyper wing of the Republican Party.

The Groypers (i.e. Tucker Carlson, Nick Fuentes, and other podcasters) are attempting to push Republicans towards a platform of Christian nationalism, isolationism, white identity, and a cacophony of kooky conspiracy theories (mostly involving the Jooooos; the “Epstein class”). Mainstream Republicans, MAGA leaders, and President Trump have all disavowed their influence.

Yet Vance hasn’t just refused to disavow them -- he’s raced to Carlson’s defense.

From the Washington........

© American Thinker