Vice President of the United States JD Vance He used his wife’s cheap maternity clothes to gain political support on federal spending after US second lady Usha Vance mocked a New York Times column that analyzed the “political symbolism” of her pregnancy clothing.In an X post on Thursday, Vance shared a photo of a receipt showing his wife purchased a $50 Old Navy maternity dress for $8.75 and wrote: “America: meet your next federal budget director!”Usha Vance made the comment in critic Vanessa Friedman’s New York Times fashion column “The Politics and Power of Pregnancy Images,” which explores three prominent women in the Trump administration: second lady and White House press secretary Caroline Leavitt and Katie Miller, wife of deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller. How they publicly revealed their pregnancies at almost the same time.Friedman believed this pattern was intentional, writing that these women “created an apparently consistent and even somewhat paradigm-shifting image of the White House’s family and parenthood platform.” She added that Usha Vance was doing her part to humanize the vice president by highlighting her pregnancy.Usha Vance responded pointedly to Friedman’s article: “Now that we know the politics of my $8.75 coral maternity dress from Old Navy, I can’t wait to hear what the New York Times has to say about my elastic waist pants and compression stockings,” she wrote on the X, along with the receipt.J.D. Vance’s federal budget playfully frames the exchange as a broader statement about fiscal restraint, perfectly in line with the administration’s economic message to the working class. With household expenses still a top concern for American voters, the vice president’s wife buying an $8 dress instead of designer maternity clothes reinforced the image of the everyday person the administration has been trying to project.Ironically, J.D. Vance has been one of the Trump administration’s most outspoken advocates of U.S. manufacturing, blaming previous administrations for deciding that “America will no longer be a manufacturing powerhouse” and leaving it to “the rest of the world to make the necessities our homes and families need.” Old Navy, which is owned by Gap Inc., makes the vast majority of its clothing overseas, particularly in Vietnam, China, Bangladesh and India.
