Beverly Vance Aikins says that if she ever came face to face with Abdul El-Sayed, the Democrat running for Senate in Michigan, she would probably throw a punch — and then, in the same breath, said she has no intention of doing any such thing. The mother of Vice President JD Vance made the remark on the September 2, 2026, episode of the OutKick podcast “Tomi Lahren Is Fearless.”

The threat capped a long stretch of defending her son’s household. Host Tomi Lahren, 34, who also co-hosts Fox News’s “The Big Weekend Show,” had steered the conversation there by pointing out that El-Sayed, 41, keeps bringing up the Vance family when he talks 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. The criticism angers her — “It makes me mad, honestly” — in part because El-Sayed has no idea what her son is really like. All the same, she told Lahren, “I’m not gonna do anything about it.”

Asked why opponents drag relatives into it, she offered one word: jealousy. Her son, 42, holds the vice presidency and has a wife and four children, she noted, and she suggested El-Sayed’s jabs land nowhere, since nobody in the family gives the remarks any weight.

What El-Sayed Said About the Family

El-Sayed, the Democratic nominee in Michigan’s 2026 midterm Senate race, has aimed sharp commentary at the family for months. On the podcast “The Allen Analysis Show” in April, he said Vance “has brown kids who he thinks are less American than everyone else,” adding: “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: “It must break you every time you hug your own kids.”

The quarrel over the vice president’s grandfather traces back to a speech of Vance’s own, according to accounts published September 5: 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, his grandfather would hardly believe it.

El-Sayed returned to the vice president’s family history on August 22 in a social media post: “So do we think JD is taking Usha with him back in time to meet Papaw, or no.” The message pulled the Vance family further into the campaign brawl.

Vance Answers at a Detroit Rally

Vance hit back directly at a rally on Monday, August 31, in Sterling Heights, Mich., outside Detroit, telling the crowd, “Keep my wife’s name the hell outta your mouth, because she’s way outta your league!”

The vice president did not stop there. “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. He aimed his objection at “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.” According to accounts of the rally, he also characterized El-Sayed as a man whose sympathy is reserved for “people who share his religion, but have nothing for people who don’t.”

Those remarks pushed the Michigan contest to the center of a national argument over religion, identity and how far campaigns should go in talking about candidates’ spouses and children.

El-Sayed Points to a Trump Post

That night, El-Sayed answered on CNN and accused the vice president of hypocrisy. He said he would rather leave spouses out of the campaign entirely, then argued that President Donald Trump had made his own wife a target first: in August, Trump posted side-by-side pictures on Truth Social pairing himself and the first lady with El-Sayed and his wife, Dr. Sarah Jukaku, who wears a hijab, under 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 things down. Vance pressed his case from the stage outside Detroit, El-Sayed carried his hypocrisy argument onto CNN, and the vice president’s mother added her own voice — from a friendly podcast chair rather than a debate stage.

Aikins used the same appearance to talk about what she was paid for the 2020 Netflix adaptation of “Hillbilly Elegy,” in which Amy Adams played her and Glenn Close played her mother. “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.

Fox News put out a separate clip from the same episode on September 4, titled “Why Hillbilly Elegy Was So Painful For JD Vance’s Family.” Per the network’s description, Aikins describes seeing her past reenacted on screen, the years she lost with her children at rock bottom, and living out of her car before she got clean. The full-episode page also describes her discussing her opiate addiction and regaining her nursing license.

For Aikins, the dispute has less to do with policy than with the people in the family photos. She framed her frustration around her grandchildren and her daughter-in-law, insisting the criticism will not shake them — with the caveat that a face-to-face meeting might test her restraint.