Usha Vance steps into a harsh spotlight

Usha Chilukuri Vance, the daughter of Indian immigrants, brings a resume studded with elite legal credentials to a campaign defined by the former president’s fiery populism.

Usha Chilukuri Vance, the wife of Donald Trump’s vice presidential pick, stepped into a glaring spotlight when she introduced Senator JD Vance on stage at the Republican National Convention.

The Southern California native brings a resume studded with elite legal credentials to a campaign defined by the former president’s fiery populism.

The 38-year-old is the daughter of Indian immigrants, graduated from Yale Law School and clerked for Brett Kavanaugh when he was an appellate judge.

She later clerked for Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, starting her job about a month after her first child was born. Less than a decade ago, she was registered as a Democrat, and she has at times seemed wary of partisan politics.

“She isn’t an ideological or political person at all,” said Chris Michel, a lawyer in Washington who attended law school with the couple. “I don’t think she would have pictured or sought this particular role in politics.”

JD Vance embraces his wife Usha Vance after winning a primary election in 2022. Picture: Getty Images

Usha Vance acknowledged as much in a recent interview. “I don’t know that anyone is ever ready for that kind of scrutiny,” she said when asked on “Fox & Friends” about the possibility that her husband would be named as a vice presidential candidate. “I think we found the first campaign that he embarked upon was a shock.”

The Trump campaign didn’t respond to requests to make her available for an interview.

After Mr Trump picked her 39-year-old husband on Monday, Usha Vance resigned from her job as a litigator at the firm Munger, Tolles & Olson.

The couple, who reside in a Washington suburb, have three children under the age of 8, making them an unusually young family to occupy the vice presidency should Mr Trump win.

Usha Vance was featured in campaign ads for her husband’s 2022 Senate run, telling Ohionians the story he first chronicled in his breakout memoir, Hillbilly Elegy.

The lawmaker grew up in Middletown, outside Cincinnati, which he has described as a struggling former manufacturing town, with a mother who was addicted to drugs and a father who abandoned them.

He was eventually raised by his grandparents, Mamaw and Papaw, served in the Marine Corps and attended Ohio State University.

His wife was born Usha Chilukuri and grew up in a Hindu household in San Diego.

She majored in history at Yale University, where her extracurricular activities included tutoring public school students, volunteering for the homeless and ballet. She was a Gates Cambridge Scholar and studied 17th-century printing rights.

The couple met at Yale Law School. JD Vance credits her with teaching him how to navigate Yale and its environs, which to him felt like a foreign country.

In a New Haven Register article, she touted the local mochi (Japanese rice cake) purveyor. “Most of my friends weren’t familiar with it, but I’m from Southern California, where mochi is pretty well-known,” she said.

Usha Vance knew not only all the coffee shops and places to eat but “instinctively understood the questions I didn’t even know to ask, and she always encouraged me to seek opportunities I didn’t know existed”, JD Vance wrote in his memoir.

Mr Michel, the law school classmate, said the couple adopted their German shepherd, Casper, around the same time he adopted a dog, and they would have playdates in his New Haven backyard.

JD Vance was a consummate extrovert and bundle of energy who was always batting around a new idea, including for a potential book. Usha Vance was “calm and thoughtful”, Mr Michel recalled.

Senator JD Vance and his wife Usha Chilukuri Vance arrive on the first day of the Republican National Convention. Picture: Getty Images via AFP

JD Vance proposed to his future wife by tying a ring to Casper’s collar. The two married a decade ago and moved to Columbus, Ohio, and later to a hip neighbourhood in Cincinnati. Two years later, JD Vance’s book was published, and Donald Trump was elected president.

The book’s sympathetic portrayal of the disaffection of the white working class struck a chord. The author was initially critical of Trump but later became an enthusiastic backer.

Friends say that in many respects Usha Vance’s career was on the front burner then as she made her way up through a series of prestigious federal court clerkships.

In his book, JD Vance said his mentor, Amy Chua – a Yale law professor and author of Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother – encouraged him to withdraw from consideration for a prestigious clerkship that would have required him to move thousands of kilometres. “This clerkship is the type of thing that destroys relationships, ” he recalled her saying.

Usha Vance started her job as a Supreme Court clerk a month after giving birth to their first son, according to a 2017 interview with NBC News. “He was incredibly supportive of her when she was clerking,” Katie Wellington, who clerked for Justice Kavanaugh with Usha Vance, said of JD Vance.

Usha Vance has spent much of her career at Munger, Tolles & Olson, a firm that co-founded a child-care centre for its employees and that a trade publication once described as “progressive – perhaps radically progressive”. She was listed on the firm’s website as a litigator in its San Francisco and DC offices until her resignation.

The roughly 200-lawyer firm was founded by several partners, including the late Charlie Munger, who was Warren Buffett’s close friend and investing partner. The firm is known for hiring lawyers who had jobs as law clerks for federal courts and boasts having a dozen former clerks who worked for US Supreme Court justices.

In Cincinnati, her interests ranged from serving on the board of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra to attending Bengals football games and eating at Skyline Chili, an Ohio favorite, according to friends. The family found a home in a leafy neighborhood in Alexandria, Virgina, just outside Washington, last year, a neighbour confirmed.

The US senator from Ohio has made pointed comments about motherhood and the workplace. He wrote in a June 2022 post on X: “If your worldview tells you that it is 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.”

The Kennedys are one of the few modern parallels of top political families with such young children, said Anita McBride, author of Remember the First Ladies and former chief of staff to first lady Laura Bush. The Vance family’s youth would be an asset, though it remains to be seen how much they will want to put their young children in the public eye.

“They are still relatively new to the political scene,” McBride said. At the convention on Monday, Usha Vance walked hand in hand with her husband, wearing flats, a fitted dress and no jewellery. Her understated look contrasted with the coiffed blowouts and high heels that were prevalent at the convention.

Usha Vance doesn’t talk much about her political views but says her husband hasn’t changed his despite having once been a vocal Trump critic. More recent Ohio voter rolls list her party affiliation as Republican.

“The truth is I’ve known him now for so many years and he’s always been so true to himself,” she said in an interview with the conservative outlet Newsmax during his Senate run. “The JD that I met back in law school is the JD that I’m sitting next to right now.”

Mariah Timms, Jacob Gershman, Catherine Lucey, Katherine Clarke and Jim Oberman contributed to this article.

The Wall Street Journal