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Usha Vance must be used to making history by now: When her husband took office last year, she became the first second lady of Indian descent and the first Hindu second lady. When she and Vice President J.D. Vance announced their pregnancy earlier this year, she added to her list of historic achievements, becoming the first sitting second lady to be pregnant in more than 150 years. And now she’s got yet another first: She is the first United States second lady to … host a podcast. She just can’t stop trailblazing, this one.
Vance announced her podcast this week with an interview on the Today show with journalist Kate Snow. The show is called Storytime With the Second Lady, and Vance hopes that it will encourage children in late preschool through early elementary school to love reading. In each short episode, a special guest reads a book to the audience—in the first one, it’s just Vance, on her own, reading The Tale of Peter Rabbit, but subsequent episodes feature guests like race car driver Danica Patrick and Paralympian Brent Poppen. If you’re wondering if the show will suffer the same booking problems that have bedeviled Donald Trump’s inaugurations and other efforts, it’s looking as if the answer is yes. Patrick elected to read a book based on the Disney movie Cars, which, while very on brand, is not exactly Beatrix Potter.
It’s interesting that the second lady has decided that the best way to encourage a love of reading, considering all the resources she has access to in her position and all the influence she can wield, is through a podcast. Wasn’t I just reading an article about the problem of screen time in schools that specifically cited the issue of kids watching YouTube videos of people reading books instead of teachers reading books to their classes themselves? Oh, yeah, I was, in the New York Times. I have to admit that I question whether the best thing to do to instill a love of reading in today’s youth is to film conservative celebrities reading book-shaped Disney merch. But to be fair, most kids have never experienced the second lady reading to them before. If I know anything about kids these days, it’s that they love Usha Vance, right? Never mind that the public views on the three existing videos have yet to crack 10,000—I’m sure these people know what they’re doing.
Vance’s larger, unspoken project with this podcast may have more to do with her husband’s presidential ambitions and building a positive public profile for their family than she is comfortable saying. NBC’s Snow dutifully asked Vance whether her husband is planning to run, but the second lady attempted to deflect, acting as if it had just never come up whether he’s going to run for the biggest job in the world, shrug. I think that, more than podcasting, what she really needs to work on is her ability to dodge questions she doesn’t want to answer with a little more ease and grace. When Snow asked her whether she owned a MAGA hat, was “I’m not a hat person” the best she could come up with? Given the speed at which social media users were able to uncover several photos of her in hats, I think not. If only there were a children’s book about subtly helping your husband position himself to run for the presidency.
