This may shock you, but MAGA is not terribly fond of brown people or non-Christians even when they have republican/MAGA cred. For example, Vivek Ramaswamy, a recent republican presidential candidate and candidate for governor of Ohio went to a Turning Point rally and the MAGA audience made it clear that there’s no room for people with kooky brown people religions in their party. He wished everyone a Happy Diwali and got a disgusting but unsurprising response. FBI director Kash Patel was similarly embraced by the loving and tolerant arms of MAGA.
Ramaswamy is a prominent republican who is among the most well known people in the party over the last 10 years, and Kash Patel is Trump’s hand-picked FBI head, and MAGA still hates them. Those guys probably think they can be “one of the good ones” but MAGA’s xenophobia is unmasked and it makes no exceptions. This one is older, but Ann Coulter just came out and blatantly said it and no one gave a fuck then either.
So everyone knows Trump is not healthy and is probably going to die before he can finish out his term. He has a uniquely powerful hold over his cult that other Trump-like people have failed to replicate. It makes you wonder what’s going to happen when Trump dies – does the MAGA cult keep going on in lockstep and form around the new Trump, or does it shatter and begin in-fighting and sort of wash away? Certainly handling that transition is on the minds of a lot of political strategists right now.
JD Vance is the most obvious candidate to take over the movement given his current position, but he has several problems, including the fact that he’s married to an Indian woman, Usha. Given how blatantly xenophobic and hateful MAGA is, this is probably a significant barrier to them embracing him as the new cult leader.
JD Vance recently said that he hopes his wife converts to Christianity and that got a lot of criticism. Personally, I don’t see what the big deal is – if you believe that you have to be Christian to go to heaven and avoid hell, of course you’d want your wife to convert, you’d be insane not to. But it does sort of set the stage for religion being a wedge between them after we’ve had all of this MAGA backlash against Hindus.
Enter Erika Kirk, recently widowed by assassination. I normally wouldn’t criticize people’s behavior after a tragedy because people grieve in different ways, but she seems like quite the opportunist getting out there and not exactly seeming like a heartbroken widow. She recently said that she sees a lot of similarities to her late husband in VP Vance and they were bizarrely touchy at a political event. It is completely abnormal for a married man to touch another woman that way, publically and openly, at a political event. Having his hands on her hips, and her having her hands in his hair in an introduction – they’re practically two teenagers desperate to dry hump under the bleachers.
This feels like a soap opera plotline but it’s not any dumber than any of the other MAGA shit. It seems reasonable to speculate that they’re setting up JD Vance to dump his wife and mother of his children because MAGA wouldn’t accept a brown Hindu first lady, and they’re going to replace her with all American nazi barbie supreme opportunist Erika Kirk.
They’ll probably frame it in religious terms, that JD tried to save his wife by converting her to Christianity but he was unsuccessful and he’s worried about the influence on his kids or whatever, and he needs a Christian nazi barbie wife instead. They’ll try to capitalize on all of the bullshit hero worship of Charlie Kirk by getting those Kirk fans to follow JD Vance. Two birds with one stone.
You might think that ditching his wife of decades and the mother of his children would be a problem for family-oriented MAGA but we all know everything they claim to value is bullshit. I think Newt Gingrich married a few women with terminal cancer just so he could bang another woman on top of them on their death beds and no “family values” people gave a shit. I could give a thousand similar examples. Still, they’ll probably lay the groundwork in religious (rather than racial) terms because that’s less blatantly offensive and easier to justify to MAGA. Most of them won’t openly admit that white is the “right” race, but they of course they’re willing to say that Christianity is the right religion.
Maybe this is a bit conspiratorial sounding but if I was Usha I might be extra careful in the shower. Or perhaps near windows in high up hotel rooms. That would definitely ease the “ditching the mother of his children” narrative if his wife died and Erika Kirk was there to comfort him. Those two crazy kids, finding love after the tragic deaths of their spouses, what a romantic story.
I don’t know why this story caught my attention so much with MAGA doing worse shit than this every day. I guess I’m just getting out ahead of a crazy ass story fit for a soap opera or a bad spanish-language knockoff of House of Cards.