I know that child labour is generally frowned upon but, in this economy, sometimes you’ve got to put your kid to work. Last week I gave my four-year-old an important assignment: she had to watch all four episodes of Usha Vance’s new video podcast and provide a detailed review. Forty minutes later, her verdict was in: “I love it, mama.”

To be fair, my kid loves pretty much anything on a screen. Still, I didn’t hate Usha’s new children’s podcast either. Launched a couple of weeks ago, Storytime With the Second Lady is aimed at promoting literacy. In the first instalment, Usha reads The Tale of Peter Rabbit; in subsequent episodes, a celebrity guest reads their favourite book.

Usha isn’t a born entertainer – she sounds scripted and her delivery is a little wooden – but she has a calming voice. If you can ignore the rank hypocrisy of the second lady talking about the joys of kids reading while the Trump administration bombs schoolchildren abroad, slashes education funding at home and tries to cut library funding, the podcast is pretty wholesome.

It’s also somewhat unexpected. Usha, who gave up a successful career as a lawyer when Vance was chosen as Trump’s running mate, has kept a low profile in recent years. Apart from the fact that podcasts are very hot right now, what precipitated the second lady’s sudden move into the media?

Partly, Usha has explained, her love of reading. She certainly seems to like being photographed with a book in her hand. In recent years she has been snapped wielding a copy of Daniel Mason’s North Woods, Alf Wight’s All Creatures Great and Small, Tana French’s In the Woods, Anthony Doerr’s Cloud Cuckoo Land and Emily Wilson’s translation of the Iliad. She also has a Goodreads account and started reading Death Comes for the Archbishop on Sunday night – which seems like a troll move considering her husband’s current beef with the Catholic church.

While a love of literature, and a concern for dropping literacy rates, may play a role in her new gig, a cynic may wonder if there isn’t a little more at play. Usha’s husband, JD Vance, is clearly plotting a 2028 presidential run. While he may currently be Republicans’ top choice in the next election, he doesn’t have his boss’s charisma and can come across as a petulant little creep. I don’t doubt that various political strategists have decided that Usha, who used to be a registered Democrat, might help JD win a few hearts and minds. There has certainly been speculation that this is why Usha is now pregnant with the couple’s fourth child.

Usha’s podcast certainly seems to be aimed at a different demographic than the people her husband likes to court. Despite the fact that his wife and children are brown, JD will happily go to bat for a racist if it helps him politically. Last year, for example, he dismissed bipartisan outrage over racist messages in a Young Republican group chat. He has, to be fair, condemned some white supremacist attacks on his wife (telling them to “eat shit”) but remains in a party that has demonized migrants and made undermining diversity, equity and inclusivity part of its core platform.

Perhaps JD needs to call the woke police on his own wife’s podcast because it’s suspiciously inclusive for a Trumper. The second episode features Danica Patrick, the most successful woman in US open-wheel car racing history. (Though, to be fair, Patrick is famous for being a Trump supporter.) The third episode has Brent Poppen, a disabled two-sport Olympic medalist, reading a book about a little boy who learned to play wheelchair basketball. And her most recent episode features soccer player Ian Fray, who was born to a Jamaican father and an American mother.

Usha isn’t the only conservative wife to get in the podcast game in order to soften public opinion around Maga. Last year Katie Miller, who is married to Stephen Miller, Trump’s chief of staff, quit her job with Elon Musk to launch a podcast aimed at conservative women. The aim of The Katie Miller Podcast, she announced, was to have “real honest conversations” about what matters to women. She seems to have a very strange idea of what that is because her very first episode featured an interview with JD Vance. Still, while the content may be questionable, there is a very clear political strategy behind Miller’s pivot from political bigwig to content creator. “In order to cultivate the future of Maga, we have to talk to women,” Miller told the Washington Post last August. “If conservatives want to continue to gain ground amongst conservative women, you have to talk to women from a life and lifestyle perspective,” she further elaborated in an Axios piece.

If Storytime With the Second Lady was meant to make Vance more palatable for 2028, it doesn’t entirely seem to be successful. My daughter may be a newly minted fan but very few other people seem to be tuning in. Three days after being uploaded, the fourth episode of the podcast only had 564 views on YouTube and the channel only had about 2,370 subscribers. Pretty embarrassing considering this is the second lady we’re talking about. Could the White House not have shelled out a few bucks and bought Usha some more views?

Speaking of views: does Usha have any genuinely held beliefs? Because she is brown and the daughter of immigrants, and was once a registered Democrat, there has been a fair bit of speculation about just how comfortable Usha is in Magaland. Various friends have told the media that, like her husband, she was once “appalled” by Trump. However, again like her husband, Usha seems to have a flexible belief system. Before the 2024 elections Jai Chabria, a Republican strategist and family friend, told the Washington Post that Usha “had a similar shift in views [to JD] and fully supports Donald Trump and her husband and will do whatever she can to ensure their victory”.

Now it seems that Usha is doing whatever it takes to ensure she becomes the next first lady. She went to Hungary with her husband earlier this month in a failed attempt to boost Viktor Orbán in the election. She has overcome her aversion to the spotlight to go on NBC News and promote her podcast.

She’s supporting a president responsible for siccing immigrant agents on children and separating thousands of kids from their families, while waxing lyrical on that podcast about how wonderful it is for her kids to know that “every night they can come home and we’ll be there for them”. She’s clearly all in.