Second lady Usha Vance has revealed that she has no plans to dye her gray-streaked hair blonde to fit into the MAGAverse.
In the first interview she has given in the role, Vice President JD Vance’s wife opened up about not matching the stereotypical image of a Republican politician’s partner.
An interviewer from The Free Press asked her what it was like to be an Indian-American woman in “MAGA Land—with all the blondes and Botox and facelifts, the low-cut blouses and nine-inch heels.” Vance’s response was to break into laughter.
“I’m laughing,” she said, “because it would be really hard for me to be blonde.” Vance explained further that “that color would look totally absurd”—she’d rather let it go gray.
“For what it’s worth, my reception into this world—and I’m not from a particularly wealthy background, not from a very fashion-oriented background personally or professionally—has been really positive,” she added. “People don’t seem to care all that much what I look like.”
Vance, 39, is both the first Indian-American and first Hindu second lady. A Yale-educated lawyer like her husband, she left her job at a prestigious D.C. law firm when he became Donald Trump’s running mate.
She told The Free Press that she wasn’t exactly prepared to make the transition from a high-powered lawyer to a full-time political celebrity.
“The day before JD was selected—I did not know he was going to be selected—I was working as a lawyer, and I had the wardrobe of a person with three children who likes to do things outdoors, who has a dog, who doesn’t like things to be too precious,” she said. “And then, a switch flipped, and it’s not like it came with a whole new wardrobe and stylist and everything.”
Nevertheless, she said that her experience in the world of politics—from Vance’s days as an Ohio senator and critic of Trump to his MAGA turn last year—“has been almost uniformly positive.”
“People have just been quite accepting,” she said.
While her husband was on the campaign trail, Vance said that fans of his and Trump’s ticket would approach her with warmth in public.
“I remember a woman came up to me, a black woman came up and gave me a giant hug and said, ‘I love you so much,‘” she said.
The Free Press interview pressed Vance on the question of MAGA’s attitude toward race, asking her about her husband’s push in February to rehire a 25-year-old DOGE staffer who Elon Musk fired for tweeting, “normalize Indian hate.” The engineer, Marko Elez, was eventually brought back.
“Do I think it’s great when people talk about ‘normalizing Indian hate’ or something like that?” Vance responded. “Absolutely not. I think it’s terrible.”
She said, however, that she doesn’t think racist comments are anything new. Rather, it’s “our relationship to this information”—consuming it online—“that is potentially new.”
