A Michigan Senate race just got very personal.
Abdul El-Sayed spent months taking shots at Vice President JD Vance’s wife and children — and now the Vice President’s mother has had enough.
And what Beverly Vance Aikins told Tomi Lahren about El-Sayed is exactly the kind of thing that goes viral for a reason.
What Beverly Vance Aikins Actually Said
Aikins sat down with Lahren for a wide-ranging interview covering her triumph over opioid addiction, Netflix’s Hillbilly Elegy, and her son’s rise to the vice presidency. But it was her reaction to El-Sayed’s comments about the Vance family that stopped the conversation cold.
Lahren showed Aikins a clip of El-Sayed saying, “Can you imagine, he’s got brown kids, at some point he’s going to have a really awkward conversation with his kids, like, you made your career hating people who are different.”
Aikins did not mince words.
“I think that man’s an idiot,” she said. “Those are my babies. I love those babies. I would do anything for them. I love Usha as if she were my own daughter.”
And then she said the line that lit up the internet.
“I mean, it makes me mad, honestly, because he doesn’t know JD, and he doesn’t know, you know, what type of person he is, and I do, but in the long run, I’m not going to do anything about it. I mean, I’d probably punch the guy if I ever see him, and then that would get me in trouble,” Aikins said. “So, I’ll just go with the flow.”
She also said she thinks jealousy is behind the attacks. “I think they’re jealous, honestly. I mean, JD’s 42 years old. He’s got a beautiful wife, four beautiful children, and jealousy is the only thing I can think of.”
And as for El-Sayed’s commentary carrying any weight with the Vance family? “He can take all the shots he wants. It’s gonna get no merit from any of us.”
What El-Sayed Actually Said — and Why It Matters
The clip Lahren played was from El-Sayed’s April appearance on “The Allen Analysis Show” podcast, where he made a series of comments about Second Lady Usha Vance and the couple’s children that drew immediate backlash.
El-Sayed said on that podcast, “What do you think is going through Usha’s head when he talks? She’s like, ‘Damn, I have to sleep with him.'” He then continued: “I guess she’s pregnant so something is happening. Can you imagine, he’s got brown kids, at some point he’s going to have a really awkward conversation with his kids, like, you made your career hating people who are different.”
That was not a one-time slip. El-Sayed later posted on X, writing, “So do we think JD is taking Usha with him back in time to meet Papaw, or no…” — a comment widely interpreted as suggesting that Vance’s late grandfather would have rejected his Indian-American wife because of her ethnicity.
Usha Vance is the daughter of Indian immigrants. El-Sayed used her racial background as a political prop in a Michigan Senate race she has nothing to do with.
JD Vance responded publicly at a rally in Sterling Heights, Michigan. “But whatever you want to talk about, Abdul, keep my wife’s name the hell out of your mouth, because she’s way out of your league,” Vance said. He also called El-Sayed “very, very evil” and accused him of embodying a politics that fights “for one group at the expense of others.”
El-Sayed’s past comments about Sharia law drew similar fire. Vance pointed to El-Sayed’s record of arguing that criticisms of Sharia law were rooted in white supremacy. “He once argued, not too long ago, that criticisms of Sharia law were rooted in White supremacy,” Vance said at a speech at the Cleveland-Cliffs Middletown Works steel plant in Ohio.
Sharia law mandates the death penalty for apostasy and blasphemy against Islam — doctrines that are fundamentally incompatible with the First Amendment protections of free speech and free exercise of religion that define the American constitutional order. Treating opposition to Sharia as white supremacy is not a fringe position in El-Sayed’s political world. It is a core part of how the far-left frames any pushback against political Islam in America.
The Bigger Picture in Michigan — and What the Democrat Party Just Did
El-Sayed won the Michigan Democrat primary over Representative Haley Stevens, who had been recruited into the race by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and endorsed by Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer. Stevens was the establishment pick. El-Sayed beat her anyway, backed by Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
And here is where it gets instructive. Schumer spent months working to stop El-Sayed. Then El-Sayed won, and Schumer immediately praised him for running “an energetic campaign that inspired thousands of Michiganders across the state.” Schumer and Senator Kirsten Gillibrand released a joint statement saying, “We look forward to working with Abdul and Democrats across Michigan to win this seat in November.”
That is the Democrat Party in 2026. The establishment fights the radical left in the primary, loses, and then falls in line. Every single time. There is no real resistance to the direction the party is heading — just a brief performance of concern, followed by a press release of congratulations.
El-Sayed runs on Medicare for All — a government-run healthcare takeover that would eliminate private insurance, ration care, and saddle American families with enormous new tax burdens. He has called for abolishing ICE. He has a documented history of supporting defunding the police, deleting the social media posts when they became inconvenient. He has called Israel an “apartheid” state. And he argued in a podcast that critics of Sharia law are white supremacists.
But Schumer says Democrats are “united” behind him. Good to know.
El-Sayed now faces Republican Mike Rogers in the November general election for Michigan’s open Senate seat, vacated by retiring Democrat Senator Gary Peters. The seat is considered one of the most competitive in the country. Michigan is a state President Trump carried in 2024, and El-Sayed’s radical platform — Medicare for All, abolish ICE, open borders — is not a natural fit for the working-class voters who flipped the state.
Beverly Vance Aikins is not a political operative. She is a grandmother who watched a Michigan Senate candidate use her grandchildren’s skin color as a campaign prop. Her reaction was raw, direct, and entirely understandable. She said she would punch El-Sayed if she ever met him, acknowledged that would get her in trouble, and then said she would just go with the flow.
That is not a campaign surrogate reading from a briefing book. That is a mother and grandmother who drew a line.
And it is worth asking what it says about a candidate that his most memorable moments on the campaign trail involve mocking a sitting Vice President’s pregnant wife, weaponizing the racial identity of the couple’s children, and implying that a dead working-class grandfather from Ohio would have rejected his Indian-American daughter-in-law.
El-Sayed’s platform calls for government-run healthcare that would strip Americans of their private insurance and their ability to choose their own doctors. It calls for abolishing the immigration enforcement agency that removes violent criminals from American communities. And it is built on a brand of identity politics that treats opposition to Sharia law as racism and uses the skin color of a Vice President’s children as a rhetorical weapon.
The voters of Michigan will make their own judgment. But Beverly Vance Aikins made hers — and she did not need a pollster or a consultant to tell her what she thought.
Sources: The Hill; Fox News Digital; Detroit News; Mediaite; Semafor; CBS News; NBC News; CNN; Real Clear Politics
