Beverly Vance Aikins, the mother of Vice President JD Vance, says a chance run-in with the Democrat campaigning for Senate in Michigan would not stay civil. Speaking on the September 2, 2026, episode of the OutKick podcast “Tomi Lahren Is Fearless,” she said she would probably take a swing at Abdul El-Sayed if the two ever met — then added, in the same breath, that she has no intention of doing anything of the kind.
The remark capped a long stretch of the interview spent defending her son’s household. Tomi Lahren, 34, who also co-hosts Fox News’ “The Big Weekend Show,” had steered the conversation there by pointing out that El-Sayed, 41, keeps working the Vance family into his commentary about the vice president, his wife and their children.
“I think that man’s an idiot,” Aikins said. Of the couple’s four children, she said, “Those are my babies,” and there is nothing she would not do for any of them. She called Second Lady Usha Vance, 40, one of the most genuine people she has ever encountered. “I love Usha as if she were my own daughter,” she said.
“I’d probably punch the guy if I’d ever seen him, and then that would get me in trouble,” Aikins said. Part of what gets to her, she said, is that El-Sayed has no idea what her son is really like. “It makes me mad, honestly,” she said. Even so, she told Lahren, “I’m not gonna do anything about it.”
She chalked up the attacks on relatives to a single motive: jealousy. Her son, she noted, is 42, sits in the vice presidency and has a wife and four children. The jabs from El-Sayed, in her telling, land nowhere, because no one in the family gives the remarks any weight.
What El-Sayed Has Said About the Family
Months of sharp commentary from El-Sayed, the Democratic nominee in Michigan’s 2026 midterm Senate race, preceded the exchange. On the podcast “The Allen Analysis Show” in April, he said the vice president “has brown kids who he thinks are less American than everyone else,” adding: “Like, that’s wild to look at your own kids and be like you don’t actually belong as much in this country that I brought you into.” He went on: “Bro, it must break you every time you hug your own kids.”
The vice president had delivered a speech in which he said that if he went back in time to visit his “Papaw” and told him about the state of the Democratic Party in 2026, he’d hardly believe it.
A social media post on August 22 returned the candidate to the vice president’s family history: “So do we think JD is taking Usha with him back in time to meet Papaw, or no.” That message pulled the Vance family further into the campaign brawl.
Vance Responds at a Detroit-Area Rally
Vance took the criticism on directly at a rally in Sterling Heights, Mich., outside Detroit, on Monday, August 31, telling the crowd, “Keep my wife’s name the hell outta your mouth, because she’s way outta your league!”
The vice president kept going from the same stage. “There is something about Abdul El-Sayed that is very, very evil and on the rise in the United States of America today,” he said. What he opposed, he told the crowd, was “people who see themselves, not as citizens of a common nation fighting for every single person, whether they’re Jewish or Christian, whether they’re white or Black or Brown, but see themselves as fighting for one group at the expense of others.” He also characterized El-Sayed, according to rally accounts, as a man whose sympathy is reserved for “people who share his religion, but have nothing for people who don’t.”
Those remarks have made the Michigan race the center of a national argument about religion and identity, and about how far campaigns should go when they talk about a candidate’s spouse and children.
El-Sayed Cites a Trump Post
El-Sayed answered that night on CNN, accusing the vice president of hypocrisy. He would rather leave spouses out of the race entirely, he said, before arguing that President Donald Trump had gone after his wife first with an August post on Truth Social. That post set side-by-side pictures of Trump and the first lady against El-Sayed and his wife, Dr. Sarah Jukaku, who wears a hijab, beneath a caption reading “Two very different Americas.” “Donald Trump, almost as soon as I was nominated, tweeted a picture of me and my wife relative to him and his wife, trying to highlight the fact that my wife wears a hijab, as if to make an argument that that’s somehow less American,” El-Sayed said.
Neither camp has shown much appetite for cooling the fight. Vance pressed his case from the stage outside Detroit, El-Sayed carried his hypocrisy charge to CNN, and the vice president’s mother added her voice from a friendly podcast chair rather than a debate stage.
Another clip from the same sit-down, posted September 4, has Aikins explaining why the 2020 Netflix film “Hillbilly Elegy” was hard for her family to watch as she described the years she lost with her children at rock bottom, when she was living out of her car before she got clean. The full-episode page also covers her battle with opiate addiction and her reclaiming of her nursing license.
More of the September 2 conversation was released September 5, including an exchange about what the movie paid her. “Do you think that you made enough money off of ‘Hillbilly Elegy’?” Lahren asked. “Um, I’m happy with what I made,” Aikins replied. Asked whether there should be a “Hillbilly Elegy 2,” she deferred to her son. A September 6 account of the interview reported that she also reacted to the vice president’s “childless cat ladies” spat with Taylor Swift.
For Aikins, the quarrel comes down to the people in the family photos rather than to policy. Her grandchildren and her daughter-in-law anchored the frustration she voiced, and she maintained that the attacks will not rattle them. Her own composure, she allowed, might not survive a face-to-face encounter with El-Sayed.
