When Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trump finally announced his running mate as Ohio senator JD Vance, back in July, it shocked many. This is a man who once described himself as a “never Trump guy”.
A 40-year-old former venture capitalist, Vance made a name for himself after the release of his bestselling 2016 memoir Hillbilly Elegy, which details his blue-collar upbringing in white, working-class America. But it is the stellar credentials of his wife, Usha Vance, which the Republican vice-presidential candidate has previously said he feels “humbled” by.
A graduate from both Yale and Cambridge, Ms Vance has worked as a corporate litigator at a prestigious San Francisco law firm, as well as clerking for conservative Supreme Court John G. Roberts Jr and Brett Kavanaugh, when the latter was an appeals court judge.
While she has thus far largely remained out of the political spotlight, Ms Vance wields considerable influence over her husband’s political moves, he himself has said. However, the 38-year-old’s glittering career as a high-profile lawyer, and her liberal-leaning university friendship circles, somewhat fly in the face of her husband’s anti-establishment, populist brand. In 2021, he gave a keynote speech at the National Conservatism Conference speech titled “The Universities are the Enemy”, and has railed against women working “90 hours a week in a cubicle at the New York Times or Goldman Sachs”.
But it appears the couple are both full of political contradictions. While Mr Vance famously called Donald Trump “America’s Hitler” and is now alongside him on the Republican ticket, Ms Vance has had an even more extreme Damascene conversion, having been a registered Democrat as recently as 2014.
Here’s everything you need to know about Usha Vance, America’s potential Second Lady.
The daughter of immigrants to a string of elite universities
The daughter of Indian immigrants, Ms Vance, born Usha Chilukuri, grew up in Rancho Peñasquitos, an aspirational suburb of San Diego. Her parents, a mechanical engineer and a biologist, were part of a tight circle of Indian American academics and professionals.
Friends from Ms Vance’s schooldays have described her as a “leader” and a “bookworm”, according to the New York Times. “By age 5 or 6, she had assumed a leadership role,” Vikram Rao, a close family friend of Ms Vance’s told the paper. “She decided which board games we were going to play and what the rules were going to be. She was never mean or unkind, but she was the boss.”
This ambition and drive were evident when, at 17, she was one of a group of high schoolers taking part in a trivia competition interviewed by he San Diego Union-Tribune. “It’s not enough to know the answers,” she told the paper, “you have to do it fast.”
After graduating high school, Ms Vance enrolled at Yale to study history, where she spent four years, before obtaining a Gates Fellowship at Cambridge to research the origins of copyright law, receiving a Master of Philosophy in 2010.
“My Yale spirit guide” – meeting JD Vance
It was when Usha returned to Yale in 2013, this time to study law, that she met her now husband. The pair both joined a discussion group on “social decline in white America”.
“She seemed some sort of genetic anomaly, a combination of every positive quality a human being should have: bright, hardworking, tall, and beautiful,” her husband wrote in his now famous memoir. “I joked with a buddy that if she had possessed a terrible personality, she would have made an excellent heroine in an Ayn Rand novel, but she had a great sense of humor and an extraordinarily direct way of speaking.”
On the surface, it seemed to outsiders that the outgoing Mr Vance and the shy Ms Chilukuri may have seemed an odd pairing. But she would go on to become instrumental in Mr Vance’s political success. Inspired by their discussion group, the reading list for which included papers such as “Urban Appalachian Children: An ‘Invisible’ Minority in City Schools”, she helped Mr Vance organise his ideas for his breakout memoir Hillbilly Elegy. In 2020, the book was adapted into a Netflix film directed by Ron Howard, and Ms Vance was played by the glamorous actress Freida Pinto.
“Usha was like my Yale spirit guide,” he wrote in Hillbilly Elegy of his wife. “She instinctively understood the questions I didn’t even know to ask and she always encouraged me to seek opportunities that I didn’t know existed.”
The pair were married in an interfaith ceremony in Kentucky in 2014 – Usha Vance’s family is Hindu, while her husband converted to Catholicism in 2019. They have three children – sons Ewan and Vivek, and a daughter, Mirabel.
In 2018, the couple moved from San Franciso to Ohio, purchasing a $1.4 million Victorian Gothic house in an affluent neighborhood on the east side of Cincinnati, with sweeping grounds for their dogs, Pippin and Casper. The 5,000 square-foot house dates back to 1858 and is considered an significant home by local historians.
“Usha definitely brings me back to Earth a little bit,” Mr Vance told the Megyn Kelly Show podcast in 2020. “And if I maybe get a little bit too cocky or a little too proud I just remind myself that she is way more accomplished than I am.”
“People don’t realise just how brilliant she is,” he added, saying that his wife is able to read a 1,000-page book in only a few hours. “I’m one of those guys who really benefits from having sort of a powerful female voice over his left shoulder saying, “Don’t do that, do that.”
A lawyer at a “radically progressive” firm
A lawyer by trade, in 2015 Ms Vance joined Munger, Tolles & Olson, working as a litigator in the San Francisco and Washington, D.C. offices, according to the company’s website on her now-defunct profile page.
After leaving the firm in 2017, she went on to serve as a law clerk for the Supreme Court until 2018. While at the Supreme Court, Ms Vance clerked for Brett Kavanaugh, now a Supreme Court justice, while he was on the District of Columbia court of appeals, and then for Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts. Both men are part of the Supreme Court’s conservative majority.
She later returned to Munger, Tolles & Olson in January 2019, where her practice focused on “complex civil litigation and appeals in a wide variety of sectors, including higher education, local government, entertainment, and technology, including semiconductors,” according to the company website. The firm announced Monday that she had resigned.
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However, much of her career is seemingly at odds with her husband’s populist, anti-establishment rhetoric. Ms Vance’s ex-law firm describes its corporate culture as “radically progressive”, and a 2019 article in The American Lawyer placed its diverse hiring practices in the “cool, woke category.” According to two anonymous colleagues, Ms Vance was perceived by at work as liberal or moderate, the New York Times reported.
In stark contrast, Mr Vance delayed the confirmation of State Department roles by sending nominees a questionnaire to determine whether they were too “woke.” In June 2022, two days after the Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade, Mr Vance tweeted, “If your worldview tells you that it’s bad for women to become mothers but liberating for them to work 90 hours a week in a cubicle at the New York Times or Goldman Sachs, you’ve been had.”
A political enigma: from registered Democrat to Republican donor
It is part of a wider image of Ms Vance as something of a political cipher. At Cambridge, friends told the New York Times that she moved in mostly liberal and left-wing circles, including a handful of Marxists. As of as recently as 2014, she was a registered Democrat.
While for many, Ms Vance’s sparkling academic CV might be a welcome sign of expertise, it is antithetical to much of the Republican bases’s anti-intellectual movement. In 2021, Mr Vance himself gave a keynote speech at the National Conservatism Conference speech titled “The Universities are the Enemy”.
But, since her husband sought the Ohio Senate seat in 2022, Usha has embarked on something of a political rebrand. In December 2021 she gave money to Blake Masters, an Arizona Senate candidate, a fellow national conservative, Federal Election Commission (FEC) records show. It is her only political contribution on the FEC’s record.
In August 2022, the Vances made the decision to appear together on Newsmax, the ultra-right wing news channel – further to the right than Fox News – which refused to call the 2020 presidential race for Joe Biden for more than a month after the election. That year, Newsmax published a piece with the headline “Whatever They’re Teaching at Yale Law School, It’s Frightening.”
Ms Vance’s metamorphosis somewhat mirrors her husband’s own political trajectory. Once a never-Trumper, he has variously referred to the Republican Presidential candidate as “America’s Hitler”, an “idiot”, “reprenhsible” and a “cynical asshole.” Only a few short years later, he has transformed into one of Trump’s most loyal allies.
“Sometimes people say that he’s changed a lot, but the truth is I’ve known him now for so many years, and he’s always been so true to himself,” Ms Vance told Newsmax.
In an interview with Fox & Friends last month, Ms Vance struck an cautious tone about the prospect of her husband running for the second highest office in the country.
“I’m not raring to change anything about our lives right now, but I believe in JD, and I really love him, and so we’ll just sort of see what happens with our life,” she said.
“I don’t know that anyone is ever ready for that kind of scrutiny,” she continued. “I think we found the first campaign that he embarked on to be a shock. It was so different from anything we’d ever done before. But it was an adventure.”
It remains to be seen if election day on November 5 will spell major change for Usha Vance and her husband.
