Former MSNBC anchor Joy Reid speculated about Vice President J.D. Vance’s marital status due to his wife’s Indian American heritage and his friendliness with Charlie Kirk’s widow, Erika Kirk.
While on the “I’ve Had It” podcast, Ms. Reid suggested he could take up with Ms. Kirk in an attempt to appeal to his MAGA supporters.
“They can’t have the successor to MAGA be the guy with the Brown Hindu wife,” she said. “They’re also Christian nationalists. That ain’t going to work. That’s why he’s throwing his wife under the bus. Poor Usha. Or she’s in on it.”
Reid appeared to suggest that if Mr. Vance ditches his wife, Usha Vance, whom he has been married to for a decade and has three children, it could be a strategic political move.
“What most motivates MAGA? Hatred and nonwhite immigrants,” Ms. Reid told co-hosts Jennifer Welch and Angie Sullivan.
The former MSNBCer said Mr. Vance may not be the 2028 presidential heir because President Trump’s supporters would not accept his wife as first lady.
“Wouldn’t it be the most perfect fairy tale, MAGA fairy tale, if he finally sees the light that he needs a white queen instead of this brown Hindu?” Ms. Reid said.
At a Mississippi Turning Point USA event this month, Mr. Vance said he hoped his wife, who was raised in a Hindu family, would be “moved by the same thing that I was moved by in church.”
The vice president, who is Roman Catholic, later clarified that his wife has no plans to convert and that he respects her free will.
Social media has been flooded with memes and rumors about Ms. Kirk and the vice president since the two embraced at a Turning Point event last month.
Ms. Reid said she would be suspicious if a woman hugged her husband like that, also targeting Ms. Kirk for wearing leather pants, saying it is “not widow wear.”
Ms. Reid’s show was removed in February by MSNBC, which has changed its name to MS NOW, and she hosts “The Joy Reid Show” on YouTube.
Ms. Welch sparked outrage when she laughed on her podcast at a video of a protester celebrating Charlie Kirk’s death. The conservative activist was gunned down in September at a Turning Point USA rally at Utah Valley University in Orem.
Andrew Kolvet, a spokesperson for Turning Point USA, took to social media to condemn the podcast’s conversation with Ms. Reid, saying they “turned a moment of shared grief into a sexualized liberal fever dream where they project their own racism and disdain for Christians onto Erika Kirk, Vice President Vance, Second Lady Usha, and half the country.”
He added, “This is an insight into the spiritual core of the radical left: sneering, deriding, and jeering at the suffering of a widow because her slain husband was conservative.”
