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You know it’s bad when the lip readers and body-language experts start weighing in. Over the past week, the internet’s most dubious commentators and rumormongers have turned their attention away from their usual targets and toward an unlikely (and in all likelihood imaginary) pairing: Vice President J.D. Vance and Charlie Kirk’s widow, Erika Kirk. All it took were some photos of the two sharing a warm greeting on stage at a Turning Point USA event in Mississippi.
At first glance, Vance and Kirk do look a little too familiar in the photos—why does he have his hands on her hips? Why does she have her hands in his hair? When paired with a quote from Erika Kirk that also circulated widely that day, about how she saw some similarities between her late husband and Vance (“No one will ever replace Charlie, but …”), it didn’t look great for either party.
I’m guessing some of the people who got to work speculating about whether there was something romantic between Vance and Kirk didn’t bother to watch any video footage of the moment captured in the photos. Fair enough—and it’s not like I watched with noble intentions. I freely admit I hit play hoping for something scandalous. Based on those pictures, I was expecting something along the lines of that time Michael Jackson kissed Lisa Marie Presley onstage at the Video Music Awards. What I saw instead was your classic nothingburger. The so-called passionate embrace lasted for a second, and Vance only briefly touched Kirk’s hips as he was pulling away. Though I can’t explain Kirk’s head grab, it all went by so quickly that it wouldn’t have registered as inappropriate to me at all if it weren’t for the pictures. That quote about replacing Charlie was misleading, too: It was referring specifically to how Vance was standing in for Charlie that day, debating students like he used to at Turning Point events.
The flimsiness of the evidence notwithstanding, a jokey narrative quickly emerged online last week asserting that Vance was going to leave his wife, Usha, for Erika. Or possibly that Usha ought to watch out for Erika, who, the speculation went, was a wolf in grieving widow’s clothing. Either way, together, Vance and Kirk would be a power couple better suited to the MAGA movement, given that Kirk, unlike Usha, is white, and thus the stage would be set for Vance’s 2028 presidential run. Maybe even with Kirk as his vice president? It was all on the table. The aforementioned body language and lip-reading experts got in on the action too, noting how intimate and mutual the interaction was. Amid all the chatter about a possible romance with someone who wasn’t his wife, it didn’t help the situation that Vance had said something curious about Usha at the same event, telling a reporter that he hoped she would eventually give up Hinduism and convert to his religion, Catholicism. As opposed to Kirk, anyone paying attention might have extrapolated, who was already a devout Christian.
That this was all pretty far-fetched isn’t to say it wasn’t funny—at times. “Erika Kirk wore those pants on purpose, to remind JD Vance of his favorite leather couch,” went one post online, referring to Kirk’s leather leggings and a joke about Vance’s predilection for couches that has been subsumed into his lore. People had a lot to say about her pants, actually. I was frankly disturbed by the number of posts and comments I saw that criticized Kirk for wearing such tight clothes when she’s supposed to be grief-stricken. This is sexist bullshit—though I personally would not wear those pants because I would be afraid of people calling me a boomer.
In the days since the event, Vance and Kirk have obliquely addressed the internet’s ruling that they’re a couple now. In an interview that will air on Fox News this week, she spoke about the scrutiny she’s faced, referring to “cameras analyzing my every move.” Vance, meanwhile, called the commentary about his marriage “disgusting” in a post online.
I wouldn’t go that far, but it does seem off-base. Though leaving your wife for a woman who some might deem hotter and all would agree is blonder is very much something most MAGA men would consider their prerogative, we have to remember that Vance is mostly only pretending to be a MAGA guy. Underneath, he’s a member of the elite, a snob who likes that his wife is a Yale-educated lawyer. For all we know, a former Miss Arizona USA might be slumming it for him. He seems to revel in his hypocrisy, enjoying his ability to say racist things in public and then go home to his half-Indian children. Usha, too, appears happy with their arrangement. It’s true that Vance has shown that he’s more than willing to shape-shift when it’s convenient for him, so I wouldn’t put anything past him, including, I guess, forsaking his family. But a major problem with the Vance-Kirk rumors is that they presuppose that Vance is some kind of stud, magnetic enough to have a widow acting reckless. And that, as we all know, is simply not believable.
