In June, just after my conversation with Heilbrunn, Vance visited the Richard M. Nixon Library and spoke favorably of the disgraced ex-president. In today’s social media world, Vance said, the Watergate scandal wouldn’t last more than 12 hours. In fact, the two politicians share other traits: their anger toward elites and their belief in a so-called deep state. And one other thing: Nixon believed in conspiracies. As a California senator, an ally of the virulently anti-communist senator Joseph McCarthy, Nixon had peddled the myth that the US government was riddled with Soviet spies.
Vance, for his part, is a self-avowed conspiracy theorist. This was evident on September 10, 2025, when the Trump White House got word that Charlie Kirk, the head of Turning Point USA, had been assassinated as he spoke at Utah Valley University. Vance and a few of his team had been texting with Kirk, the VP’s close friend, just before the shots were fired. “I walked into Susie [Wiles]’s office and she was crying,” Vance had told me last year. “Usha happened to be there. And I can’t even remember why. You know, normally, she doesn’t hang out in the West Wing a whole lot.” (Usha had an office in the nearby Eisenhower Executive Office Building.)
A suspect in the shooting was quickly arrested. But Vance thought there might be more to it. “I’ve had many, many questions,” he claimed. “I don’t know how he was radicalized—or if there were people in his network egging [him] on, encouraging [him] to do it, maybe even financing.” Publicly, Vance spoke ominously of “a leftist infrastructure” fomenting violence against conservatives. “My view,” he said, “is it reveals something that’s sort of gone pretty dark in a particular corner of the far left in this country.” Yet the evidence suggests that what it actually revealed was the twisted mind of a lone individual. Kirk’s alleged shooter, Tyler Robinson, has yet to enter a formal plea.
It was Kirk’s widow, Erika, Vance writes in Communion, who convinced him and Usha to have another baby; she had told them that she’d regretted not having more children. This July, Usha gave birth to a boy, Alec. They have two other boys, Ewan, 9, and Vivek, 6, and a girl, Mirabel, 4.
In 2018 Vance and Usha were traveling in France. During a stroll through a cathedral, he writes in Communion, he underwent a kind of epiphany; in mid-August of the next year, he was baptized as a Catholic in a private ceremony. Usha, who is Hindu, had no intention of converting, but believed that her husband’s move was “good” for him. Vance says his new faith helped him develop patience. Moreover, he writes, “I needed grace.” But Vance has displayed little grace in his public exchanges with his religious superiors. In 2025 he clashed with Pope Francis on the plight of migrants. Last April, after Pope Leo XIV criticized Trump’s policies on immigration and the Iran war, Vance chided him as though scolding a wayward student: “I think it’s very, very important for the Pope to be careful when he talks about matters of theology.” In Communion, rather than apologizing, Vance doubles down on his remarks, accusing Vatican officials of offering platitudes instead of specific critiques of Trump’s immigration policy. What is it about the phrase “humane treatment”—for which the Vatican was advocating—that the vice president doesn’t understand?
In Communion, Vance’s defense of Trumpism is facile, shallow—and brief. He devotes a total of three pages to the period from his election to the Senate to Trump’s second inauguration. Explaining his adoption of the MAGA cause, the vice president writes, for instance, that Trump “had proved me wrong by being an effective president.” Maybe—if you consider governmental paralysis, futile attempts to repeal health care, a botched response to a lethal pandemic (Trump at first denied its existence and then minimized its severity), massive job losses (more than any president since Herbert Hoover), two impeachments, and an attempted insurrection to be effective. No wonder Usha was so much better at moot court.
