During her rise through America’s most prestigious schools, law firms and judicial clerkships, Usha Vance rarely — if ever — volunteered her opinions on the nation’s bitterly partisan politics to friends and colleagues.
But she did express revulsion at former president Donald Trump’s actions on Jan. 6, 2021.
Vance told friends she was outraged by Trump’s incitement of the deadly riot at the U.S. Capitol and lamented the social breakdown that fueled his political support, according to one friend, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive conversations. Her view at the time contrasts with the later pronouncements of her husband and Trump’s newly minted running mate, JD Vance, who has downplayed the storming of the Capitol and called participants who were jailed “political prisoners.”
“Usha found the incursion on the Capitol and Trump’s role in it to be deeply disturbing,” the friend recalled. “She was generally appalled by Trump, from the moment of his first election.”
Speaking the morning after Usha Vance introduced her husband at the Republican National Convention and watched his speech from the same VIP box as Trump, the friend added, “It was surreal to see her sitting next to him last night.”
That sensation is widely shared among her friends, former co-workers and fellow alumni, more than two dozen of whom spoke to The Washington Post for this story. Some watched in disbelief on July 17 when Usha Vance, 38, addressed an overwhelmingly White crowd on the convention floor that tittered uneasily as she joked about her husband learning to cook Indian food and audibly gasped when she mentioned her vegetarian diet.
A spokesperson for JD Vance declined to comment for this story or to say whether Usha Vance voted for Trump in 2020 and 2016. The spokesperson did not dispute the friend’s description of Usha’s opinions about Trump and Jan. 6. When the riot occurred, Usha Vance was working as a lawyer and her husband was several months away from launching his Senate campaign.
Jai Chabria, a Republican strategist for JD Vance’s 2022 Senate campaign and a family friend, said Usha’s views of the former president have changed, mirroring the evolution of her husband, once a fierce Trump critic.
“Usha has had a similar shift in views and fully supports Donald Trump and her husband and will do whatever she can to ensure their victory this November,” Chabria said in a statement provided by the Vance spokesperson. A Trump campaign spokeswoman did not comment for this story.
In many ways, Usha Chilukuri Vance — born to prosperous Indian Hindu immigrants, raised in Southern California and employed, until she quit last week, at a San Francisco law firm known for its self-consciously progressive office culture — appears to represent the sort of cultural and economic elite whom Republicans often rail against. A self-described “Order Muppet” remembered for her circumspect manner and almost fanatically detailed scheduling habits, she is very different, temperamentally, from the freewheeling former president and his incendiary MAGA movement.
Though she worked for prominent conservative judges and voted in the 2022 Republican primary in Ohio when her husband was on the ballot, she has registered to vote as a Democrat at least twice, records show: as a teenager in San Diego in 2004 and as a law student in New Haven, Conn., in 2010. In the fall of 2014 she registered to vote in D.C. without a party affiliation, according to elections officials.
But the forces that propelled her to the convention have long been evident, those who know her say: extraordinary ambition and deep devotion to her husband.
That ambition was contagious. JD Vance has long credited his wife as a catalyst in the evolution that led him from a troubled childhood in an Ohio steel town to the summits of finance, media and politics, calling her his “spirit guide” through the ruthlessly competitive landscape that awaited him at Yale. Her motivations and influence are key to understanding the vice-presidential nominee, who has said he “really benefits from having a sort of powerful female voice” guiding his decisions.
“She unequivocally increased his odds of success,” said Dan Driscoll, a friend who attended Yale Law School with the couple.
In JD’s early years with Usha, Driscoll said, “if you had … said, ‘You’re going to end up on your school board and go to your kid’s Little League games and own a small manufacturing business that employs people in your community,’ I think he would have defined that as success.”
Instead, picked at age 39 to be Trump’s running mate on the GOP presidential ticket, JD Vance has been anointed as the heir apparent to the leader of a movement that has transformed American politics. Vance, who greeted a raucously cheering crowd on the convention stage with an earsplitting grin, is clearly reveling in his new heights of success.
That success is also drawing new scrutiny to his much more private wife, the potential second lady, Usha Vance.
The ambitions of ‘Judusha’
Vance’s parents immigrated to the United States from southern India, settling in San Diego in the 1980s. Her father came from a family of prominent academics, a relative told the Indian Express, saying of Usha: “I always knew that she would excel academically and in any profession she chooses. You see, it runs in the family. Her great grandfather, her grandfather, her father — are all toppers. She follows in their footsteps.”
Her father is an engineer and her mother a microbiologist. Both are academics: Vance’s mother is a provost at the University of California at San Diego, and her father lectures at San Diego State University.
“I did grow up in a religious household, my parents are Hindu, and that was one of the things that made them such good parents, that make them really very good people,” she said in a recent Fox News interview.
Vance attended public high school; graduated in 2007 from Yale College, where she was elected to Phi Beta Kappa; and embarked on a prestigious teaching fellowship in China. She taught English and American studies at Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou, according to a Yale announcement that described her as having “devoted much of her time at Yale to public education, volunteering in local elementary schools and as a Girl Scouts troop leader.”
Peter Hamilton, another Yale graduate who participated in the program, recalled his surprise when he walked into Vance’s bedroom and saw the walls were covered in hundreds of color-coded Post-it notes that organized her week into 15- or 30-minute intervals.
“It was kind of intense,” said Hamilton, now an assistant professor in world history at Lingnan University in Hong Kong. “It really stuck with me. … I always thought of Usha as quite serious and highly intelligent, in a well-plotted-out kind of way.”
Vance ended her two-year fellowship in China after only one year, according to Hamilton, enrolling in Cambridge University and earning a master’s degree for her research on “the methods used for protecting printing rights in seventeenth-century England,” according to the esteemed Gates Cambridge scholarship program.
Next up: Yale Law School, where she impressed classmates by the sharpness of her intellect but left many guessing about her core political convictions. She did not join any ideological groups such as the conservative Federalist Society or liberal American Constitution Society, according her LinkedIn page and former law firm’s biography.
“People respected her intelligence,” said Doug Lieb, who was editor in chief of the Yale Law Journal while Usha worked on the review’s managing board. “She was not the sort of person who was trying to provoke controversy. I think she has a technical brain. If she thought you were technically wrong about something, she would point that out.”
Like Hamilton, Lieb still vividly recalls her organizational methods.
“Her notes were always, like, tabbed and highlighted and very meticulous and categorized,” said Lieb, who is now a civil rights attorney in New York and attended the Vances’ wedding.
Vance appeared to poke fun at her own tendencies in a 2012 Facebook post, sharing a link to an article in the online magazine Slate — “What kind of Muppet are you, chaos or order?” — and writing, “I don’t think there’s any doubt that I am an Order Muppet.” (Screenshots of Vance’s Facebook page, which is not publicly accessible, were shared with The Post.)
In an environment teeming with overachievers, Vance stood out not only for her “seemingly superhuman capacity to achieve” but as “a kind, unassuming friend who had no trouble bridging seemingly disparate social groups,” said James Eimers, a law school classmate who now works at a consulting firm that advises applicants to college and graduate school.
JD and Usha met and started dating in their first year at Yale Law School. They earned the moniker “Judusha,” a melding of their names that came to imply “awe and reverence that they were intimidating as a power couple,” said Josh McLaurin, JD’s former roommate, now a Democratic state senator from Georgia who has been outspoken in his criticism of the vice-presidential nominee’s politics.
The legacy of Yale Law’s most famous power couple — Hillary and Bill Clinton — still loomed over the campus, with many students bent on mimicking what one graduate called the “Clinton template”: several years spent burnishing elite credentials before returning to a (preferably Southern or Midwestern) home state to launch a political career.
It was a path some predicted the Vances might follow, and one that Usha seemed to invoke with admiration in a Facebook post in August 2012, the summer before their final year in law school.
“Driving through Arkansas, listening to Bill Clinton tell us about his life. Best road trip ever,” she wrote.
The post was written near Chester, a tiny town in northwestern Arkansas. She tagged a companion who accompanied her: JD Vance.
From San Francisco to Cincinnati
Usha and JD married in Kentucky in 2014 — and were separately blessed in a Hindu ceremony. Around the same time, she embarked on a series of highly competitive clerkships for Republican-appointed judges, including U.S. District Judge Amul Thapar in Eastern Kentucky, Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit and Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. of the Supreme Court.
Records from the D.C. Board of Elections show that in 2015, while clerking for Kavanaugh, Vance switched her voter registration from no party to Democratic. But on Friday, the elections office told The Post that the switch to a Democratic affiliation had been a clerical error.
Between and after her stints clerking, she was a litigator at Munger, Tolles & Olson, which has represented corporate behemoths such as Pacific Gas & Electric Co. and the Walt Disney Co. The San Francisco law firm’s workplace culture makes it “a top contender in the cool, woke category” of large legal offices, according to a January 2019 article in the American Lawyer. On its website the firm touts its “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Committee” and its welcoming attitude toward “intersex, transgender, non-binary, and gender nonconforming people.”
When Vance began working at Munger Tolles, her husband was still years away from lashing out against “woke DEI” corporations and “far-left gender ideology.” With the 2016 publication of his memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy,” he instead emerged as a thoughtful, center-right commentator on the White working class with one foot in Middletown, Ohio, and the other in Silicon Valley, where he worked with conservative venture capitalist Peter Thiel.
Vance supported her husband as he expressed this iteration of his politics, sometimes sharing links on Facebook to his commentary in publications such as the Atlantic, where in 2016 he likened Trump to “cultural heroin. He makes some feel better for a bit. But he cannot fix what ails them, and one day they’ll realize it.”
In her post about that article, Vance noted her husband’s “firm stand against Trump.”
The Vances have raised their three children, born between 2017 and 2021, in deep-blue enclaves. In 2018 they bought a $1.4 million home in the East Walnut Hills neighborhood of Cincinnati, and when in the D.C. area, they live in a $1.6 million house in Del Ray, a sought-after neighborhood in Alexandria, Va.
In July 2021, JD Vance announced that he was running for the Senate in Ohio. His victories in the Republican primary and general election were widely credited to Trump’s endorsement and Thiel’s financial backing. Usha was not a fixture on the campaign trail, although she did star in an ad, calling him “an incredible father” and “my best friend.”
“She doesn’t crave the political spotlight, but she was very much a part of the campaign,” said Chabria, the GOP strategist who worked on the 2022 race.
Vance voted in her husband’s Republican primary that year, records show. (Ohio voters do not register by party, and can vote in either the Democratic or Republican primary contests.) During the same election cycle, she donated to Blake Masters, a far-right Republican — funded, like her husband, by Thiel — who lost a Senate race in Arizona.
After moving to Ohio, Usha Vance joined the board of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra. During her husband’s brief tenure in the Senate, she continued to work as a litigator, resigning from Munger, Tolles & Olson on the day JD Vance was announced as Trump’s vice-presidential pick.
Cincinnati Mayor Aftab Pureval, a Democrat and the first Indian American to lead the predominantly Democratic city of just over 300,000, said he has never run into JD or Usha Vance at any social functions or community events.
“I’ve never met her,” Pureval said, adding that while he strongly opposes the Republican ticket, “I wish her only the best.”
A new spotlight
Last week, Usha Vance moved from relative obscurity into the spotlight at a packed convention hall in Milwaukee. Ohio state Sen. Niraj Antani, an Indian American Republican and Hindu, said he was thrilled to see her onstage.
“Having an Indian American potentially as the second lady is inspiring to so many,” he said. “I’ve received countless calls, texts and emails from our community wanting to meet and support JD and Usha.”
Other Trump supporters were less enthused. An outpouring of racist bile directed against Usha Vance from the far right has erupted online. Nick Fuentes, a white supremacist and antisemite who visited the former president at his Mar-a-Lago resort in 2022, questioned the wisdom of having JD Vance on the ticket, asking, “What kind of values does a man have to marry somebody that far outside your race, who isn’t even a Christian?”
Her appearance also generated confusion, for very different reasons, on the other side of the political spectrum. Some friends and colleagues said they have struggled to reconcile their affection for Usha Vance with the hard-right turn of her husband’s politics.
Among other things, JD Vance has denigrated those crossing the border illegally from Mexico, pushed legislation that would criminalize gender transition procedures for minors, and said he would have acquiesced to Trump’s efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election — as then-Vice President Mike Pence did not — by certifying fraudulent slates of electors.
“Am I surprised to see Usha speaking onstage at a major political convention? No. She’s brilliant,” said Chad Callaghan, a Los Angeles-based writer and marketing director who said he was friendly with her in college. “Am I surprised to see her there to support a man who seems to be building political power by punching down at trans folks and immigrants? Yeah, that part caught me off guard.”
In her speech introducing JD, which lasted less than five minutes, Usha Vance herself offered no clues to how she was processing the moment. At a convention suffused with fervor for its presidential nominee, she did not once mention Trump.
But she did acknowledge in passing what so many who know her said they felt as they watched her onstage: amazement.
“It’s safe to say that neither JD nor I expected to find ourselves in this position,” she said. “But it’s hard to imagine a more powerful example of the American Dream. A boy from Middletown, Ohio —”
At that point Vance was forced to take a lengthy pause, looking from side to side as her voice was drowned out by raucous cries from the crowd. They were chanting her husband’s name.
Aaron Schaffer and Alice Crites contributed to this report.
This post appeared first on washingtonpost.com
