Donald Trump’s running mate, J.D. Vance, met his wife, Usha, at Yale Law School. Their backgrounds were different. Vance, 39, is, by his own admission, a Catholic Scots-Irish hillbilly from a working-class family in Middletown, Ohio, who served as a Marine before attending law school. Usha Chilukuri Vance, 36, is a Hindu, the daughter of Indian immigrants, who grew up in San Diego, California.
As of 2014, she was a registered Democrat. Even last month, she sounded ambivalent about her husband running for the second-highest office in the land. “I’m not raring to change anything about our lives right now, but I believe in J.D., and I really love him, and so we’ll just sort of see what happens with our life,” she said in an interview with Fox and Friends.
How he depends on her
Vance is on record, however, as depending on her. “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,” Vance said in a 2020 podcast. That voice belonged to his grandmother when she was alive. “Now,” he said on the podcast, “it’s Usha.”
Described as a leader and a bookworm by friends, the daughter of a mechanical engineer and a biologist, she graduated summa cum laude with a bachelor’s degree in history from Yale University. Then, she attended Cambridge University in England as a Gates Cambridge Scholar, receiving a Master of Philosophy degree in 2010. Subsequently, she graduated from Yale Law School with Vance in 2013. They were mentored by the well-known professor Amy Chua, author of the bestselling Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mom.
How he fell in love with her
Vance wrote about how he fell in love with his wife in his memoirs, Hillbilly Elegy, published in 2016. “I fell hard for a classmate of mine named Usha. As luck would have it, we were assigned as partners for our first writing assignment, so we spent a lot of time during that first year getting to know each other. She seemed some sort of genetic anomaly, a combination of every positive quality a human being should have: bright, hardworking, tall, and beautiful.”
She helped him succeed, wrote Vance. “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.” Usha helped him organize his ideas about social decline in rural white America, which formed the basis of his memoir, Hillbilly Elegy.
The couple got married in 2014, a year after they graduated from law school. They have three children: sons Ewan, six, Vivek, four, and daughter Mirabel, two.
She clerked for two Supreme Court justices
Usha, a high-powered trial lawyer who clerked for two Supreme Court justices, is giving up her job after her husband was picked as Trump’s running mate.
“Usha has informed us she has decided to leave the firm,” a spokesperson for the law firm Munger, Tolles & Olsen told Bloomberg Law.
She joined Munger Tolles in 2015, leaving for a one-year stint clerking for Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts before returning to the firm in 2019, according to her LinkedIn profile. She also served as a clerk for Justice Brett Kavanaugh while he was a federal appeals court judge in Washington, DC, before joining the firm, says Bloomberg Law.
Home in Cincinnati, Ohio
The Vances bought a 5,000 square-foot Victorian mansion on spacious grounds in an affluent neighbourhood in Cincinnati, Ohio, for $1.4 million in 2018. It dates back to 1858.
Press attention in Ohio to Vance has been scant, but sometimes racially insensitive, says the New York Times. A cartoon in The Plain Dealer, a Cleveland newspaper, made fun last October of Vance’s criticism of the Cleveland Indians baseball team’s decision to be renamed the Cleveland Guardians. The cartoon showed Vance saying: “Only Indians name change I support is my wife’s to ‘Senator J.D. Vance’s spouse.’”
Vance protested. “You’re making a racist joke about my wife, and no one is calling them out for it,” he said. “It’s disgusting and despicable, and it’s why nobody trusts the media.”
Vance ended his acknowledgments in Hillbilly Elegy with a tribute to his “darling wife, Usha”. “So much of the credit for both this book and the happy life I lead belongs to her,” he wrote.