00:05:07.000And ever since then, I sort of had the shorthand for Yale Law as like a cross between like the secret history and like eyes wide shut.
00:05:17.240You know, it's just like it's dark. There's weird sex stuff.
00:05:21.020There is a lot of drinking, like a lot of alcohol that elite badly behaved.
00:05:27.780So could you tell us a little bit about how they did at Yale Law?
00:05:31.380Because it seems like they had, you know, they were together for most of the time they were in law school.
00:05:35.380It seems like they had pretty different experiences.
00:05:38.680Right. Well, I mean, I, you know, I do need to say that the Amy Chua thing is complicated. You know, what you described about navigating this party world in which you would be have to be sort of like laughing along while you were sexually harassed or worse by powerful men is certainly real.
00:05:54.760But it's also the case that Amy, by having this kind of magnetic, extroverted personality, also mentored people who found themselves sort of on the outside or felt themselves to be on the outside of Yale Law School, who weren't in the old boy network, who she thought had interesting, compelling stories.
00:06:14.060people like J.D., who came from a really difficult background, had been in the Marines, had
00:06:20.420abusive childhood, addiction in his family, and so on. Not everyone that she mentored was like
00:06:28.520this. Many of them were young women who she kind of groomed in a particular sort of way.
00:06:34.340I tell the story in the piece about a poker night at their house where the writer David Latt met
00:06:39.840Usha and JD as students. And it got cut for space. But somebody else who was there was
00:06:46.700Judge Alex Kaczynski, the Ninth Circuit judge who resigned early rather than fully investigated
00:06:54.340for numerous allegations of sexually harassing people, including clerks. And, you know, people
00:07:00.680even now in this story now, but also back when I did the other piece, people would talk about how
00:07:05.420Amy would warn people, I'll tell you the truth. This guy will sexually harass you1.00
00:07:09.800and you'll have to work really hard, but I'll help you if you want to do it.
00:07:14.560And it's complicated because obviously this is a totally noxious way to have to experience
00:07:21.920wanting to pursue your professional ambitions, that the price of admission is a bunch of creeps
00:07:27.380that you are expected to entertain and drink with. But people told me that they appreciated
00:07:32.680that Amy was much more forthright about it, that she would be willing to tell people,
00:07:37.060well, this guy's a creep. Let me know if you're okay with that. Whereas other people would just
00:07:40.960kind of operate in this abstracted world of, you know, of course, this is what everyone wants to
00:07:46.000ascend to. And it was a don't ask, don't tell. And so I would say that JD excelled in that kind
00:07:53.200of informal world that Amy was kind of holding court. It was certainly not the only way to get
00:07:58.860a clerkship at Yale Law School, and it was not the only way to succeed. It was kind of a fun and
00:08:04.680exciting one for a lot of people, even though it held a lot of peril and, frankly, inequality.
00:08:11.200You know, I have a quote from someone in my piece about how Amy allegedly didn't like Usha because
00:08:16.000she didn't play this game. I think the word used was bullshit in the quote. She didn't like to0.98
00:08:23.840drink and gossip, and JD did. And so I think that Usha was somebody who was sort of a very
00:08:32.440traditional path of high achievement, got the perfect grades, impressed everyone she met,
00:08:37.640never made any waves, never offended anyone. Everyone seemed to like her. People said she
00:08:43.880was really likable, but nobody felt like they really knew her very well. Whereas JD was someone
00:08:49.000who could hang and was clearly extremely malleable, depending, we see this to this day,
00:08:54.480depending on who he was around and who he was sucking up to, he would thrive in that particular
00:08:59.260way. And I think, you know, I have a quote from somebody, Chris Lepinic, a lawyer in Los Angeles,
00:09:06.420who knew them both well in law school, who says that when they first got together, he asked JD,
00:09:12.920what drew you to Usha? And he said her ambition. And I'm sure it's not the only thing that drew
00:09:18.880them together, but she was somebody who actually really understood how to navigate this world of
00:09:25.260elite conventional achievement. I mean, the first thing we have to say about that poker night,
00:09:30.380there are so many nightmare blunt rotations in this piece. It's just, it's incredible.
00:09:36.300Oh yeah. And of course, Alex Kaczynski was the boss of Brett Kavanaugh for whom Usha clerked,
00:09:41.720just to close that circle. Yeah, no, exactly. I think one thing that your piece does a really
00:09:45.940good job at is that in some way there are, there is an indication that, I mean, Usha sort of doesn't
00:09:51.580participate in the kind of skull and bones, but for misfits kind of thing that Rubenfeld and Chua
00:09:59.860are selling. And I should say that, you know, I know a few Chua pets myself and they all describe
00:10:05.840the allure of this. At the same time, it's clear that the episode with which you open the piece
00:10:15.040about Usha kind of running interference
00:10:44.420Although, frankly, I am being much more acerbic in my paraphrasing than I think either of them would ever actually be.
00:10:50.140But, I mean, Chua had made the same argument, right?0.94
00:10:52.380She's like, if I really believed this, would I send my daughter to clerk with him, right?0.98
00:10:56.180It's all threaded through the immediate family and through, you know, friendship networks and to say, like, how can he be bad when he never grabbed my butt?0.97
00:11:06.860There's two quasi-pseudo-feminisms operating here that you've identified, I think.0.99
00:11:11.660And one is the real Amy Chua, as I've been given to understand it by people when they're, you know, being very open about it, is at least she's honest, this kind of ribald, you know, purportedly pragmatic men are always going to be pigs.0.97
00:11:30.980So women can just have a whisper network and tell each other, you know, this guy will grab your butt, dress nicely for Brett Kavanaugh, as Amy later admitted she had done, because it'll help you.0.96
00:11:42.500But I'm also getting you a job. And then there is the, I don't even know if it's a quasi-feminism, because it really is almost just a tribalism, which is that I have to defend my hearth and home.0.97
00:12:00.140And I think you could read that Kavanaugh anecdote alongside two other points in the piece. And one is that when they do this joint interview in 2017 with Megyn Kelly, and JD says, Usha's so loyal that when our dog got in trouble at daycare, you know, she said, the daycare is not good enough for our dog.
00:12:20.240good, she said, but it isn't. And that when, you know, that when she finally does talk about
00:12:29.920Kavanaugh's, you know, in public, because that email is an email she just sent to her law school
00:12:34.540classmates, it's to identify with his wife for quietly standing by him. I'm sure we'll have a
00:12:40.820lot more to say about that. But I just think, you know, the smallness of this vision recedes to
00:12:48.140how bad could he be? He gave me a job. Or maybe he's bad, but I have to defend him because
00:12:53.600his badness reflects on my professional qualifications. And what else reflects on my
00:12:59.260professional or personal qualifications or reputation, perhaps is a better word for it,
00:13:04.140then I must stand by my man. I must stand by my boss. I must form a united front. I'll stand by
00:13:13.420my dog the same way that I would stand by J.D. running with Donald Trump. And I'm not even sure
00:13:18.000you could call that feminism as much as it is a sort of blood loyalty. Yeah, yeah. Even in the1.00
00:13:23.360most distorted vision of what feminism could be. Well, it occurs to me on several levels,
00:13:28.100there is a way in which Usha's impulses towards this kind of quasi-tribalistic loyalty
00:13:37.080and defensiveness towards those in her circle is really characteristic of a lot of the conservative
00:13:45.380feminities we've been identifying together on our podcast, right? It is a small circle of people
00:13:54.220whose loyalty is earned either through blood or through transaction, right? And it is a willingness
00:14:02.280or it implies a willingness to stake one's own reputation out of, uh, the ongoing ability to be
00:14:11.040of service to these men, right? Um, the public servility to somebody like Kavanaugh that she
00:14:21.000exhibited in that email where she says, no, I want to refute, uh, this rumor attributed to Amy Chua0.84
00:14:27.600that to get a Kavanaugh clerkship as a woman, you have to be very good looking,
00:14:31.980is the same kind of impulse that she is now exhibiting when she, you know,
00:14:39.960clutches J.D. Vance's arm and attests to his good character on stage at the RNC.
00:14:46.500I mean, it's also, I mean, the other part of this, and that's a little bit awkward for an episode that's featuring three white people,
00:14:53.280but there is also, of course, a racial and immigration component here, I think, right?
00:14:57.600There is this implicit offer, especially I would say to Asian Americans, frankly, to be kind of the good one, the good kind, right? The one that you hold everyone else up against to say like, well, she could do it. Why can't you?
00:15:11.580And the way in your piece you pull together sort of her comments on legal immigration versus illegal immigration, assimilation, and also religion, right?
00:15:23.960The fact that the role Hinduism seems to play in her household, it's not that there's anything kind of intrinsic there, but it is always trying to make the distinction between, you know, you've let me into these spaces and I won't let you forget it.
00:15:45.180I won't let you down versus, you know, maybe I was smart and brilliant enough to be in0.93
00:15:53.780those spaces anyway and screw you and your rules, right?
00:15:56.580She very much seems to embody the former.1.00
00:15:59.960And there is a, you know, racialized components to that.0.93
00:16:04.140There's also, of course, a class component to that.
00:16:05.900It may well be what she and JD ultimately share, right?
00:16:09.520That he also feels through his extremely complicated and anxious relationship to his own bloodline, for lack of a better term, is kind of provisionally accepted into this world.
00:16:23.920And it's just so, and wants to just perform gratefulness in all ways. And that is something
00:16:30.140that, yeah, that a kid from the wrong side of the tracks in Appalachia and, you know, the child of0.86
00:16:37.340recent immigrants might sort of share. It may be, although I think that there's, I think that's a0.96
00:16:42.460compassionate read. I think that there's another read of Usha's class background, which is that,
00:16:47.320You know, she is from a family of academics in India. You know, like her great aunt in law is like a distinguished scientist who's still teaching at the age of 90 something who was interviewed in the Indian press about how she's still, you know, such a distinguished scientist.
00:17:03.080In the U.S., obviously, the immigration discourse can be flattened a certain way. I think there was an instinct similar, probably. I don't know if it was identical, but as I was beginning the piece, I was thinking about the way that liberals have initially projected on Melania Trump.
00:17:25.000okay she's an immigrant she seems to hate her husband maybe she actually disagrees with him
00:17:29.380well she seems to say hate her husband we know that much uh the rest of it in terms of where
00:17:34.360her sympathies lie seem to be projection um ivanka trump might actually be a better analogy daughter
00:17:40.420also um somebody who kind of seemed to want to play it both ways and initially in the very you
00:17:47.820know beginning of the trump family's introduction as political figures seemed so polished so polite
00:17:53.580had moved through elite circles in New York. And also, I think, potentially similar to Usha,
00:18:00.080sort of seemed to send signals that said, I might be on your side. Now, that all fell by the wayside
00:18:04.640in the real swing of the Trump administration. But during the campaign in 2016, I think there
00:18:09.740was this feeling of like, oh, well, how bad could it be, Jared and Ivanka? We know them from New York
00:18:17.940And so I think that there was a little bit of an assumption
00:18:23.780that because of Usha's sort of telegraphing
00:18:27.640a particular kind of position, that she might be a liberal.
00:18:31.740And it's not that she necessarily wasn't before.
00:18:34.420It just seems to have been a very thin affiliation.
00:18:38.040So I was told by a friend of theirs that J.D. had told them
00:18:41.080that that Usha voted for Hillary in 2016. She was registered as a Democrat in different
00:18:47.600jurisdictions where she lived. How committed was she to these beliefs? I don't know. But but I,
00:18:54.440you know, she grew up upper middle class. Her parents were academic scientists. Her mother's
00:18:58.880the provost of the California State Campus in San Diego. So it's a different kind of immigration.
00:19:06.380I mean, I am also an upper middle class immigrant. It's just my parents are lawyers. You know, I'm white. And so that's different from what Usha, I'm sure Usha experienced much more people treating her like an other purely out of people's ignorance or inability to pass as white.
00:19:23.960But there is also this tradition of Indian-American conservatism, and you actually don't need to look further in the U.S., that you don't need to look further than even their classmate, who is both from Ohio and Indian-American, Vivek Ramaswamy, who was in their class at Yale Law School and was friendly with them.
00:19:41.560And they, in Ohio, have spent Thanksgiving together, he said, and he described Usha buying children's books for his children.
00:19:50.620um obviously Nikki Haley Bobby Jindal both Indian American governors that were Republican
00:19:56.180and you know one thing that I kept doing reading your piece was trying to find that thread to grasp
00:20:04.540onto I thought maybe part of the explanation is a Hindu Vata sympathy and maybe that is what
00:20:11.040converted her into like American conservatism and I got to the part in your piece where you
00:20:17.260talk about her clerking for roberts and you said that roberts wrote hawaii versus trump
00:20:23.240the case that uh upheld the muslim ban while she was his clerk and i thought aha i've got it like
00:20:30.420it's an anti-muslim bigotry that was her entree into the american conservative ideology and that's
00:20:37.840what did it and then you have in a parenthesis like people who worked with her at the time said
00:20:41.540she didn't work on that opinion and i felt like lost again i don't know enough about how she
00:20:45.720thinks of her Indian heritage or her parents' Indian heritage. You know, she was born in
00:20:49.740California. She grew up, she talked about growing up in a community of immigrants. I mean, I, you
00:20:55.200know, I didn't use them for the piece, but I looked at photos because, you know, somebody was
00:21:00.100saying to me, the cringe factor of the story too, is that like the first millennial to run, you know,
00:21:05.660on a major party ticket, that there are these Facebook photos, and I'm around the same age as
00:21:10.100them of Usha and her high school friends, totally normal, like them partying in high school. And
00:21:16.160they called themselves the booty tag crew. I don't know what it means. I didn't get into it for my
00:21:20.880piece. Just corny shit that people did in high school. And she stayed and she you can see from0.99
00:21:27.020these photos that she had an enormously diverse friend group that included immigrants from all
00:21:33.180over the world. This is a California story, of course. And it included African-American friends,
00:21:38.800white friends, Asian American friends from all over the world, all over the region. And she
00:21:45.080stayed friends with them. I believe she's still friends with many of them.
00:21:50.960So they were bridesmaids at her wedding. So I don't know how much to sort of impute one factor
00:22:00.520of her upbringing versus another. To me, what seemed most powerful was this idea of being a
00:22:07.780kind of empty vessel of the meritocracy to say okay this is the next thing that i'm supposed
00:22:15.120to accomplish and um and then the next and then the next and then having a kind of like reverse
00:22:20.620my feral lady with jd where she is the one to mold him to the folk ways that she has understood
00:22:27.400because she went to yale college too um and she was a salutatorian at his high school right and
00:22:32.680he he says this and also in a more conventional gendered way she's like the civilizer you know
00:22:40.140he's this angry um outsider and she's the voice on his shoulder telling him you know he described
00:22:47.180that it was first his grandmother who raised him and then it was her so she's both introducing him
00:22:51.660to this world and she's the insider in this formulation she may have felt like an outsider
00:22:56.500at various times but in the in the way that he describes it she's telling him what fork to use
00:23:02.320Is that going to be the sequel to Hillbilly Allergy from Chua Pet to Usha Pet?
00:23:09.240I'm very interested in the ways in which the family loyalty that we talked about, there was a change in him.
00:23:16.520I mean, the change in him obviously seems to have been instrumental.
00:23:23.480you know realizing that he would not have a political future if he was an anti-Trump
00:23:30.200Republican which is what he began as but how much of it for him is sincere where Usha gets
00:23:36.540together with a guy at Yale Law School who has a different background than a lot of other people
00:23:40.820at Yale Law School but is so egalitarian that he tells a friend that he is willing to be a stay-at-home
00:23:47.240dad and the assumption here is that Usha's career is skyrocketing and then you know less than 10
00:23:53.460years later, she's resigning from her law firm. She's most likely made professional sacrifices
00:23:59.260for his professional ambitions. All of her friends are talking to the press about how,
00:24:05.540and to be clear, her friends also can't believe that this has happened. So it's not just,
00:24:10.040you know, resistance liberals being like, surely this brown woman can't believe this.
00:24:15.180People who know her very well are either befuddled or angry, or they just think there's no way she
00:24:21.960believes this. She's just playing along because she loves him. And so she's experienced something
00:24:27.120just in the last really four years since he converted to MAGA and converted to Catholicism
00:24:33.380in the last five years that is different from the man that she married. And it just so happens that
00:24:38.780it's playing out on a stage in which we all might end up living under this man's rule and not just
00:24:43.900Yeah, it's so interesting. I also think some of that must point to the fact that some of those liberal credentials, and this is, I think, where we get back to Ivanka Trump to some extent, can be quite skin deep.
00:25:00.820how much of that, maybe before really Trump came on the scene, some of that could just be
00:25:06.760habitual, right? A kind of habitual liberalism, right? When you write that, you know, that
00:25:11.720she may be, quote, holding her nose as she participates, or at least that she would like
00:25:17.580people to believe that she is, right? There, I underlined that. I was like, Ivanka, right? Like,0.84
00:25:22.700this gesture of signaling possible non-participation when there's nothing to suggest
00:25:29.360non-participation, right? Like the kind of Kremlinology that was like invited by, you know,
00:25:35.900Jarwonka to like, to resolve a cognitive dissonance that comes with the kind of reorientation that
00:25:42.700you just described, right? Which is so common in the United States these days. There is this kind
00:25:48.040of skin deep liberalism that appears to be quite easy to discard for people who are, you know,
00:25:55.540whose investments are ultimately in the goodness and brightness of institutions that have made them
00:26:01.600extremely rich or extremely powerful or the goodness and the rightness of themselves yeah
00:26:05.940because she then says if i didn't think she says this in the fox news interview i didn't quote it
00:26:10.460but there's this vague sort of if i didn't think that he could do a lot of good for the country
00:26:15.280like good like what does that mean for whom and for what and to what ends but it's just this sort
00:26:20.480of like vague thing of i believe in jd and jd will do good without bothering yourself too much
00:26:26.540with the particulars of the actual harm or damage in the world you know i think i think we're like
00:26:31.360we're circling around two cognitive dissonances here and one like orin i think you just hit on
00:26:37.220is is this idea that the people who inhabit these like liberal coded institutions are liberal coded
00:26:44.840social circles, you know, people at Yale, or for that matter, Stanford, who might, you know,
00:26:52.960live on a coastal city, and have a lot of gay friends that those people might also become
00:27:00.060conservatives or harbor conservative beliefs is something I think a lot of people who are close
00:27:03.960to the folks who wind up doing that don't understand, right, maybe because they have
00:27:08.300failed to consider how their own participation in such institutions, and their own lifestyle
00:27:13.460implicates them in these same hierarchies right so that's the one cognitive dissonance like how
00:27:18.300could this person with these like liberal social and professional trappings have conservative0.99
00:27:23.580beliefs or do um right-wing things and then there's another another one about what women's1.00
00:27:31.300ambition means right because there's one way to look at usha vance and say this person was clearly0.65
00:27:38.860a gunner her whole life right salatorian at her high school really good college um gunning for
00:27:47.000those prestigious clerkships at yale law you you mentioned in the piece you have a line where like1.00
00:27:52.480she stood out as ambitious at yale law which is insane and then she gets married and has a couple1.00
00:28:01.280kids and she kind of disappears you know for a while they moved to chicago she's she does crazy1.00
00:28:08.240things like immediately start clerking within weeks of giving birth to her first child at the1.00
00:28:13.000Supreme Court. But then she kind of disappears from her law firm a little bit. She resigns
00:28:19.960eventually after kind of languishing as an associate. She's working remotely. It doesn't
00:28:25.380seem like she's doing those, you know, like 60, 80 hour associate weeks. It seems like she's
00:28:31.720raising a bunch of kids. Right. And I think what we're identifying here is that there is a way0.95
00:28:37.100for the meritocracy for women to involve actually a withdrawal from paid work or from public sphere
00:28:45.500participation, because what you can do is climb the meritocracy almost vicariously via supporting
00:28:53.340a man that you've attached yourself to, right? Like she left her personal ambition a little bit
00:29:00.940behind. In one sense, when she, you know, she's not a lawyer, practicing lawyer anymore, but she
00:29:08.220has accelerated her personal ambition in another way by being, you know, a barnacle on the ship
00:29:14.180that is J.D. Vance. Yeah. I mean, certainly you could compare it to Doug Emhoff, right? Because
00:29:19.960he also resigned his law firm position. A lot of people told me that they were surprised that she
00:29:25.420did that and I was like well but I thought it was customary because um Doug Emhoff did it when
00:29:30.840Kamala was nominated for vice president in 2020 just to avoid any kind of appearance of impropriety
00:29:36.700but I think I think you're right that there is a there's a question mark there because
00:29:41.700the most interesting sort of pivot point for both of them and their professional aspirations which
00:29:47.260is that they began in this what we would think of as egalitarian sort of companionate marriage model
00:29:53.660where he's even or even more so that he's claiming that he's going to subsume his career to hers
00:29:58.800and only a few years later she is subordinate to his political ambitions and that happens to
00:30:09.720coincide chronologically with becoming a mother and I don't know how to disentangle it I don't
00:30:15.880know if anybody else or even she would be able to disentangle it but she does have three children
00:30:20.580under the age of eight. And, you know, I have two children, my two younger children are younger
00:30:26.680than her or the same age as her younger children. And I frankly find it incomprehensible
00:30:32.320to, I don't know, to be on the campaign trail with them. You know, like we just, you know,
00:30:38.400went away for the weekend and nobody slept for a week. It is genuinely hard, I think, to
00:30:43.780be present for small people and still maintain the sort of punishing political career that
00:30:50.760involves traveling all over the place. That includes running for Senate. But it is a fact
00:30:56.100that when she accepted her clerkship, I think this is actually worth stepping back and looking
00:31:01.700at the chronology here, because Usha becomes pregnant, finds that she's pregnant after she's
00:31:07.760already accepted the clerkship on the Supreme Court, because the hiring arc is really far in
00:31:13.080advance, right? The scheduling is really far in advance. So she's interviewing for clerkships
00:31:17.080with lots of different justices, which is a very elite thing, like a very hard to get even one
00:31:21.340interview. She's interviewed by, I was told, Clarence Thomas and Sotomayor and Roberts.
00:31:27.040She winds up accepting a position, which actually shows you what a cipher she was ideologically.
00:31:32.020Because, I mean, justices will hire clerks who are slightly different or ambiguous ideologically
00:31:37.360if they're distinguished enough, but still to have that much of a range is the first time I've ever
00:31:41.040heard of anyone doing that um and then she finds out she's pregnant when she's already accepted
00:31:47.740the clerkship is my understanding and this is the part where as jd talks about it he he this is what
00:31:55.220he describes as it's the most transgressive thing i've ever done uh which i thought you know again
00:32:01.460this is so interesting because i also note that he keeps saying although i noted he didn't do this
00:32:06.460yesterday he keeps saying my wife has three children yeah in a podcast he did yesterday
00:32:11.320I noticed he said we have three children like 10 times so I think he got caught yeah yeah a lot of
00:32:17.180people noticed that he was doing that yeah no a lot of people noticed he was doing it at the
00:32:20.620times interview yes and I realized that he had actually been doing it since 2022 so I guess what
00:32:25.020I'm saying is that so in the interim not only does she become pregnant but there's a senate seat open
00:32:30.840in Ohio and it's the one he doesn't actually end up running for but when he returns to Ohio it's
00:32:36.140while she's still pregnant with their first child. So when their son is born, and you and I talked
00:32:41.060about this a little bit before, when their son is born, they're actually technically on paper
00:32:45.660living apart. He's in Ohio, she's in DC. And when her mother comes to stay with them to help
00:32:51.260stay with her is the actual accurate term. This man who once said, I'm going to be a stay at home
00:32:57.180dad has actually in the service of his ambition decided to live in a different state, again,
00:33:01.960at least for the purposes of establishing residency to run for Senate, he doesn't choose
00:33:06.580to run in that race. But that was like, why does he need to start his, I'm going to fix the opioid
00:33:11.100crisis thing this particular year when there's a Republican primary in the Senate coming up?
00:33:15.780Gee, you don't think that that could wait because of your family concerns? So after that, there is
00:33:21.160this kind of split where she moves to Ohio after her clerkship. That's not what's where her firm
00:33:26.300doesn't have offices. She has two more children. How much of this was a constrained choice? How
00:33:31.520much of it was a real choice. All I know is that in the ensuing years, J.D. takes a sharp right
00:33:37.600turn. He converts to Catholicism. Around 2020, he realizes, he says that he's wrong about Trump.
00:33:44.280He becomes, he's sort of openly auditioning for Trump's endorsement in the next Senate race that
00:33:49.080he does run for and is elected for thanks to Trump. And so how do you, how do you disentangle
00:33:55.300his religious conversion, his political conversion, becoming a parent, and whatever she may have
00:34:02.640wanted to do herself. I just simply do not know how you can, even in her head. As I was teasing
00:34:07.060this out with her friends, trying to understand how they saw it, knowing her, I kept thinking,
00:34:12.600well, let's be fair. They were compared to Bill and Hillary Clinton when David Latt ran into them
00:34:17.840in terms of the energy and the power couple dynamic and the Yale Law affiliation. But you
00:34:22.360don't have to have J.D. Vance's politics to end up with a marriage that looks very conventional
00:34:29.260in terms of putting male ambition first. So I actually don't know if it was his MAGA conversion
00:34:34.580as much as a sort of reversion to a traditional gender norm or mean, particularly when having
00:34:41.320children is involved. I mean, there could have been an element in which, you know, her trying to0.99
00:34:46.280be both a supreme court clerk and the mother of a newborn may have accelerated uh this transition
00:34:53.980uh because that was a way that they spent a year right um and well and and he could have made that
00:34:59.240easier is what i guess i'm saying elizabeth prelagar you know that there was a piece in
00:35:02.880vanity fair that christian farias did but that said that elizabeth prelagar had a very similar
00:35:07.420timeline and they actually she clerked for justice ginsburg and they actually actually brought her
00:35:11.860baby to work at the Supreme Court. And I imagine that you can do that if you're clerking for
00:35:16.720Ginsburg. I don't know if you can do that if you're clerking for Roberts. It always would
00:35:21.060have been hard. In what ways did J.D.'s choices make it much harder? It occurs to me that what
00:35:26.920J.D. Vance is proposing for the American social order is just an expansion of what happened in
00:35:33.900his own marriage, right? This egalitarian arrangement in which a man and a woman are
00:35:39.260both taking their ambitions seriously and both being understood as agents and subjects of the
00:35:44.360union being reversed into one in which he is the public actor and she is the silent shadow
00:35:51.720uh whose life is reorganized around his uh whims and desires right and and he elaborately gives
00:35:58.760her credit for being his support and being at his side and being smarter than him in ways that are
00:36:03.480very familiar and very traditional but sound like i'm just saying oh my wife's smarter than me my
00:36:09.060wife's more impressive than me. Absolutely. I mean, and, and, you know, in the beginning it was
00:36:12.760put out there that she wasn't going to be on the campaign trail because she doesn't like it. And
00:36:17.100then she gave a very rare phone interview just last week to NBC news in which she said, um,
00:36:23.100and, and she has been present. The kids have been present. Their dog has been present after they said
00:36:27.040that she wouldn't be a campaign advisor was on the record saying that. And she said she didn't
00:36:31.420think that the children would be a feature, but now they are. Um, I sort of connected to, uh,
00:36:36.760people saying that jd vance was weird spreading the funny lie about the couch suddenly it's like
00:36:42.960his wife and kids are behind him to be like no look who married him look at these beautiful0.99
00:36:46.760adorable children would a couch fucker have this many children yeah right right no and i mean even0.95
00:36:52.260my mother was like she seems nice you know i mean it is a sort of it's a classic like the wife she's0.99
00:36:57.520the civilizer now she's the humanizer how bad could he be if this lovely seeming woman married
00:37:02.000him. And then that, that she then gives an interview last week in which she said, I'm
00:37:07.280basically, I'm paraphrasing, but she says, I'm basically here to support him and be at
00:37:11.160his side. Like she's also see his sort of like emotional support, uh, in a way that
00:37:15.840is a fully kind of self-effacing thing, which is just like, I hate being here, but I'm going
00:37:21.760to be here because he needs me. Now there's a way in which that's a, uh, a loving sacrifice
00:37:26.800to make for someone but viewed in the context of jd vance's agenda for women and everyone who
00:37:33.240doesn't conform with gender or sexuality norms it does start to seem pretty creepy now she may
00:37:39.020be joyfully choosing this but this is what this is what they're signaling to everybody is this sort
00:37:43.260of um you know i i go through i had to listen to you and i read like hundreds of hours of transcripts
00:37:50.000of jd vance on podcasts around before he declared for vice presidency and also after before he was
00:37:56.520chosen for the vice presidency um and his he was not that vocal i mean in the hillbilly elegy jays
00:38:03.720gender politics were not his thing but now you know there are there's a voluminous record of
00:38:10.680him talking about um not just the emptiness of elite values sometimes specifically narrating
00:38:19.040usha's trajectory uh or their that of their friends including friends who may have struggled
00:38:25.240with infertility or may have chosen not to have children when he's talking about the childless
00:38:29.000cat ladies. Yes, he's named members of the Democratic Party, but he's talking about people
00:38:33.760working 90 hours a week at McKinsey or Goldman Sachs or the New York Times. These are all people
00:38:38.460that they know. These are Ush's friends. He sometimes even said Ush's friends have struggled
00:38:43.180to get pregnant, things like that. And he's also narrating a particular and hierarchical view of
00:38:50.900gender difference yeah so he's saying men and women want different things they're doing different
00:38:56.060things he's talking to like these basically incel podcasters and he's talking about a vision of
00:39:01.320masculinity as aggressive and protective and he hasn't always said this you know i mean even like
00:39:06.840as recently as i think it was like 2021 that podcast with the dude who's talking about the
00:39:10.960post-menopausal female and her purpose he's saying it's he's saying we shouldn't idealize the 1950s
00:39:17.000housewife, my grandmother, told me it was very lonely. So I think that there has been this sort
00:39:21.160of, I don't know how much of it is a kind of like ex post facto justification of the way things
00:39:25.820turned out for his wife, but it sounds a lot like he's talking about her and her cohort. And it
00:39:31.460seems very pointed in light of that kind of bait and switch or transformation that I described that
00:39:36.600is really different from the man that she married. It's also a really big difference now when we go
00:39:41.520back to the comparison of the Clintons, isn't it? For however much Bill and Hillary ended up
00:39:46.980having a pretty traditional marriage, actually, in some ways, right? The rhetoric around it was
00:39:52.860always not traditional. The rhetoric around it always was way in advance of what the real
00:39:57.500relationship was like. And that's what's so striking here, that this is a marriage that
00:40:02.800may have felt modern five years ago, but then the rhetorical trappings around it
00:40:09.440becoming, with every passing month, more reactionary and more sort of back to the 50s
00:40:16.940kind of thing. And that's really the kind of shocking thing to watch this sort of re-narrated
00:40:22.660and re-cast. And as Moira was alluding, it's hard not to read into that a political program,
00:40:29.900right? The return of Usha into the role that she's being cast into now is the role that Vance
00:40:38.680wants for her generation, basically, at the very least. Right. And it's one that repudiates0.98
00:40:43.760everything that got them to this point, you know, which is just using the tools of these
00:40:48.500elite institutions out in the world in public. You know, do I think and I will say that he is
00:40:53.980also very deft and has been as a sort of like this new right thing in co-opting certain language of
00:41:00.360the left. And he does so also when he's talking about gender politics. Right. You know, he says
00:41:06.900something like, I believe he said this in the wake of Dobbs, where he said that anyone who tells you
00:41:14.620that 90 hours a week, making partner at McKinsey is a path to fulfillment, you know, is lying to
00:41:22.460you. Again, I'm paraphrasing. Well, yeah, I mean, on the left, you might say like, that sounds a lot
00:41:26.960like a critique of mean and feminism. But what is what is the remedy in JD's mind? It's not,
00:41:33.600oh, we should have a socialist utopia, or perhaps it's a socialist utopia that is enabled by unpaid1.00
00:41:42.440female labor dressed up as, oh, I believe in caregiving and kinship. Somehow it still ends1.00
00:41:48.020up being this hierarchical thing with the head of the household being JT. This is why I stress,
00:41:54.420I think that year is so instructive because is it transgressive, this is the word he used,
00:42:00.000for him to rely on the unpaid labor of his mother-in-law instead of hiring a nanny?
00:42:03.920Is it more transgressive for him to say, you know what, I'm not going to move to Ohio right now
00:42:08.300because my wife needs me. My soon to be born son needs me. Caregiving is important to me because,
00:42:14.560you know, as I understood it, when he was talking about wanting to be a stay at home dad, it was
00:42:18.920because of the profound absence of a father figure, a stable father figure that he felt in
00:42:24.200his own childhood. So, you know, money wasn't an issue for them. He was sponsored by Peter Thiel
00:42:32.020already at that point. You know, he had worked in big law. Money was not an issue for them.
00:42:38.520Ambition was the issue for them. And he could have chosen a path that would have put caregiving
00:42:42.820more at the center of his life, even just for that short period. So I think it's a really valid
00:42:47.740question. And I also think, you know, he also has said things like universal daycare is a class war
00:42:55.140on normal people. And so, you know, the assumption being that normal people want to have somebody
00:43:04.360turns out to be, you know, the female partner, the mother at home, somehow unpaid or perhaps
00:43:12.000subsidized somehow by the state. And yet he talks about how my wife is a working mother.
00:43:20.160He himself never describes himself as a working father, even though, you know, he's of our
00:43:24.880generation. I think he understands the distinction. He's a working mother. She needs to
00:43:30.680juggle. And also talking about how they, in fact, have had paid child care, which is there's no
00:43:36.520shame in paid child care. It's how I'm sitting here with you right now. But to say that normal
00:43:41.180people have an unpaid female caregiver at home obviously is a is a value judgment about what is
00:43:47.300the ideal american family thank you so much orin this is wonderful you're so good at this fun to
00:43:52.220have this much time to talk about it it's a really fun piece no it's so great and i mean again like
00:43:57.180the the way this biography sounds seems so unusual right that's the kind of the hook for the piece
00:44:06.160And on the other hand, that at every step, you have this queasy sense of recognizability that this really is the story of a generation, maybe our generation, and maybe more prophetic in what it portends than any of us might like.
00:44:22.900Yeah, it starts out as a kind of an interesting curiosity, like, why is this person the way she is?
00:44:28.860And then, you know, especially the stuff you say about Yale Law School is just so, you know, yeah, these are the people who are, you know, busy playing a quartet while the Titanic is really starting to list on, you know, on democracy itself, on the liberal order itself.
00:44:50.020I thought it was really just, it packed an enormous punch.
00:44:53.460And I really thank you for writing it.