The other day, my now politics-fascinated wife asked me if JD and Usha Vance were getting divorced. I hadn’t heard anything, but I did note that JD gives off huge “divorced guy” energy, so maybe?
Well, now we have a couple more indicators. First, he was asked about his wife’s religion at a Toilet Paper USA gathering, and said this:
"Most Sundays, Usha will come with me to church," JD continued. "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 the same way.
"But if she doesn't, then God says everybody has free will and so that doesn't cause a problem for me," he said. "That's something you work out with your friends, with your family, with the person that you love. Again, the most one of the most important Christian principles is that you respect free will."
Yeah, the respect of free will of women permeates MAGA though, alright. As long as you don’t include their reproductive organs. Those are subject to the free will of MAGA men.
JD seemed to be awfully familiar with Charlie Kirk’s widow, Erika, at what I believe is the same event but I’m too lazy to check:
Poor martyr Charlie is barely cold in his grave. Maybe she’s just a “friendly” person.
Marital infidelity is so very MAGA. It’s not just the men — Kristi Noem has been carrying on a mostly public affair with Corey Lewandowski while still married to her husband Bryon, who’s tending the farm back in South Dakota. And I certainly don’t have a whole lot of sympathy for Usha Vance, who’s a Yale law grad and former clerk for John Roberts. JD married her after the dorm couch was no longer as fun as it used to be, and before he realized that having a brown-skinned wife would be a political liability.
These people are all a certain form of sociopath. Normally, I’d think they would care a bit about how their children are going to feel about them in a few years, but they’re so fucking ambitious and heartless that the kids are accessories. (Elon Musk is the best example of this, but Vance freely admits he yells at his kids in public bathrooms.)
Like a lot of other things in politics, some kinds of personal shittiness and dumb choices is universal — professional politicians in general can be pretty weird (co-writer Joe being a notable exception). But for all the “repentance” that these supposed Christian MAGA politicians practice, it never seems very genuine. As John mentioned in the comments the other day, some people who have done awful things spend the rest of their lives with honest admissions, sincere regret and making amends. (His example was a skinhead.) Democrats have a hard time with candidates who ever make mistakes. I think we should look for sincere repentance and accept it (it’s best if the admissions are proactive, I’m looking at you, Graham Platner). But the kind of mealy-mouthed bullshit that MAGA spews needs to be treated for what it is: a get-out-of-hell free card.
