El-Sayed Rips JD Vance’s Fury Over Wife Swipe as ‘Hypocrisy’ — Accuses Trump of Starting It
Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed slammed Vice President JD Vance’s fury over a swipe at his wife, Usha Vance, as “hypocrisy” – pointing out that it was President Donald Trump who first made his spouse a target of ridicule.
The escalating feud spilled onto CNN after Vance tore into El-Sayed at a Michigan campaign rally Monday, calling the Democrat “very, very evil” and warning him: “Keep my wife’s name the hell out of your mouth, because she’s way out of your league.”
Vance was responding to an El-Sayed social media post that asked, “Do we think JD is taking Usha with him back in time to meet Papaw, or no,” after the vice president invoked his late grandfather while arguing that Sharia law would have been alien to earlier generations of Americans.
Critics online interpreted El-Sayed’s post as a jab at Usha Vance’s Indian heritage.
CNN anchor Kaitlan Collins challenged El-Sayed on Monday night as she asked whether spouses should be “off-limits.”
“Look, I’d rather not talk about spouses at all,” the Democrat replied. “The truth of the matter is that Donald Trump, almost as soon as I was nominated, tweeted a picture of me and my wife relative to him and his wife, trying to highlight the fact that my wife wears a hijab, as if to make an argument that that’s somehow less American.”
Trump posted the image in question on Truth Social in early August:

(Screengrab via Truth Social)
Turning on Vance, El-Sayed continued: “And they have this interesting dynamic. Donald Trump says one thing, i.e. data centers or tweets a picture of my wife, and then JD Vance pretends like it would be impossible for anybody ever to do something like that. So I’d like them to actually face down their own hypocrisy.”
He added: “The point that I’ve been making about his wife is that he believes in a political philosophy that says that some people are somehow more American than others.”
El-Sayed also questioned why Vance had invoked his grandfather in the first place.
“Vance said he wanted to have a conversation about me with his papaw, a person that I understand has long since passed. May he rest in peace. But why would you invoke your long-since-passed grandfather to make an argument about me if you’re not trying to take us back to a time when people like me were less than normal?” he said.
He continued: “But then that raises the question about who else might not be normal in that kind of an America. Who else might not be included in the broad spectrum of who can be an American? I believe in an America where any of us – me, his wife, any of us with different color skin, or who pray in different ways – can be just as American as JD and his papaw.”
“But he’s not making that argument,” the candidate added. “[Vance] likes to dog-whistle about these things, but when you actually call him out on it, he acts like he would never bring anything like that into our political conversation, despite he and his boss doing that every single day.”
Watch above via CNN.
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