Second Lady Usha Vance responded to Democratic Michigan Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed’s recent comments about her Indian heritage and her husband, Vice President JD Vance, saying she found the remarks more amusing than offensive, as reported by The New York Post.

“I have to admit I kind of laughed,” Usha Vance said during an interview with Fox & Friends, according to a preview released Monday. The full interview is scheduled to air Wednesday.

El-Sayed made the comments Saturday after Vice President Vance criticized the Michigan Democrat over his views concerning Sharia law.

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The vice president had invoked the memory of his late grandfather, whom he called “Papaw,” while arguing that the Democratic Party has moved away from the working-class voters who once formed its political base.

In response, El-Sayed brought Usha Vance into the exchange.

“So do we think JD is taking Usha with him back in time to meet Papaw, or no…” El-Sayed said, appearing to reference the second lady’s Indian ethnicity.

Usha Vance said she never had the opportunity to meet JD Vance’s grandparents, who died years before the couple met in 2010 while attending Yale Law School.

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But she said her experience with the family members they raised left her with little doubt about how she would have been treated.

“Yes, I never met JD’s mamaw and papaw,” she said.

“I do know and love the children that they raised: his mom, his aunt and uncle. And they have never been anything but incredibly loving. His aunt is like a second mother to me. I have to think that, if they raised children like that, they would’ve been loving as well, and I would have really, really, really loved to have met them,” she said in the interview.

The second lady also described her first experiences in Ohio after she began dating Vance. She said she had never visited the state before their relationship and that her assumptions about it quickly changed.

“It’s a culturally diverse place,” she said. “The people have been so welcoming. Everyone has been so loving. They are my family. They treat me like their family.”

The exchange followed comments Vice President Vance made while campaigning in Ohio earlier this week.

Vance discussed his late grandfather, James Vance, who worked as a welder for 40 years and supported Democrats because he believed the party represented “the party of union men.”

Vance argued that the views expressed by El-Sayed show how dramatically the Democratic Party has changed from the one his grandfather supported.

“I’d love to go back in time and tell my papa that there is a man who claims to stand for working people who says not only should we have Sharia law, but if you criticize it you’re a white supremacist. That’s not my grandpa’s Democratic Party,” Vance said.

James Vance was a stabilizing and influential figure in the vice president’s childhood, according to Vance’s past accounts. Both of Vance’s grandparents died before he met Usha Vance at Yale Law School in 2010.

Republicans were quick to defend the Vances after El-Sayed’s remarks circulated online.

“Why does Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed just assume that all white Midwestern grandparents are racist?” asked Rep. Brandon Gill (R-Texas).

The dispute has added another flashpoint to Michigan’s Senate race, with Vance using El-Sayed’s past statements on Sharia law and criticism of the Democratic Party’s shift away from its traditional working-class base.

Meanwhile, Usha Vance’s response offered a noticeably different approach: no outrage, no escalation, and apparently no need for a lecture from the Democratic nominee about what her husband’s family might have thought of her.

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