Usha Vance isn’t exactly known for saying the most revealing things during interviews. She did, after all, infamously avoid answering a question about whether she owns a MAGA cap. And she has also suggested that she and her husband, Vice President JD Vance, don’t always see eye to eye — but then she didn’t elaborate on that at all. So, a lot of unanswered questions remain (including one of the most common ones among some critics of the Trump administration: Why is she with him?)
In some ways, JD and Usha’s recent appearance on CBS News Sunday Morning was similar in that some critics said they learned absolutely nothing from watching it and felt like it functioned as “propaganda.” However, one comment Usha made about therapy is getting a decent amount of attention.
During the interview, Usha confirmed that therapy “didn’t work” for her husband.
What Usha seemed to be suggesting is that JD turned to another source for support and guidance instead of relying on therapy. During the interview, she confirmed that she once told him, “Therapy didn’t work for you; church does.”
And she still stands by that today. She did not mean to suggest that therapy never works. Instead, she said it didn’t help her husband specifically — presumably because of how he showed up for it. It sounds like he didn’t feel comfortable opening up about his feelings or processing things in that setting.
“It’s not that therapy doesn’t work for other people, but JD just didn’t have the right kind of trust in that process,” she said. “He just didn’t feel at home in it, really exploring some of the feelings that he had and trying to figure out how he wanted to be the person that he wanted to be for the rest of his life.”
But people had their own theories on why therapy “didn’t work” for JD.
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One critic of the Trump administration who reacted to this explanation on social media said that JD probably wouldn’t do well in therapy because he would have to face his cognitive dissonance. The critic mentioned JD’s previous comments about his boss, President Donald Trump, and how he now supports him. They also mentioned the Iran war and how JD stood by the president in spite of previously identifying as an anti-interventionist, among other times in which his behavior and his supposed beliefs did not seem to match.
Someone else offered another theory: “Usha Vance says therapy works for some people, just not JD. Because therapy only works if you have a soul or conscience ☹️” Oof.
Meanwhile, some people speculated that JD’s reluctance to go to therapy might be an anti-science thing. “He doesn’t believe in the science of psychology,” another person wrote.
And some critics argued that he would probably still benefit from some sort of therapeutic support. “Rejecting therapy is the reason he needs therapy,” a commenter added.
JD explained that he was looking for something that felt “stable” due to his chaotic upbringing.
“I grew up in some ways a very nontraditional household, you know?” he said. “A revolving door of people coming in, people coming out, raised by my grandparents at some points, raised by my parents at some points, my mom, my dad. So there was a certain movement and chaos to my youth, and I do think that I was searching for something that, again, felt a little bit more rooted and felt a little bit more stable.”
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