During her rise through America\u2019s most prestigious schools, law firms and judicial clerkships, Usha Vance rarely \u2014 if ever \u2014 volunteered her opinions on the nation\u2019s bitterly partisan politics to friends and colleagues.<\/p>\n
But she did express revulsion at former president Donald Trump\u2019s actions on Jan. 6, 2021.<\/p>\n
Vance told friends she was outraged by Trump\u2019s 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\u2019s newly minted running mate, JD Vance, who has downplayed the storming of the Capitol and called participants who were jailed \u201cpolitical prisoners.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cUsha found the incursion on the Capitol and Trump\u2019s role in it to be deeply disturbing,\u201d the friend recalled. \u201cShe was generally appalled by Trump, from the moment of his first election.\u201d<\/p>\n
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, \u201cIt was surreal to see her sitting next to him last night.\u201d<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s description of Usha\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
Jai Chabria, a Republican strategist for JD Vance\u2019s 2022 Senate campaign and a family friend, said Usha\u2019s views of the former president have changed, mirroring the evolution of her husband, once a fierce Trump critic.<\/p>\n
\u201cUsha 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,\u201d Chabria said in a statement provided by the Vance spokesperson. A Trump campaign spokeswoman did not comment for this story.<\/p>\n
In many ways, Usha Chilukuri Vance \u2014 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 \u2014 appears to represent the sort of cultural and economic elite whom Republicans often rail against. A self-described \u201cOrder Muppet\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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 \u201cspirit guide\u201d 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 \u201creally benefits from having a sort of powerful female voice\u201d guiding his decisions.<\/p>\n
\u201cShe unequivocally increased his odds of success,\u201d said Dan Driscoll, a friend who attended Yale Law School with the couple.<\/p>\n
In JD\u2019s early years with Usha, Driscoll said, \u201cif you had \u2026 said, \u2018You\u2019re going to end up on your school board and go to your kid\u2019s Little League games and own a small manufacturing business that employs people in your community,\u2019 I think he would have defined that as success.\u201d<\/p>\n
Instead, picked at age 39 to be Trump\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
That success is also drawing new scrutiny to his much more private wife, the potential second lady, Usha Vance.<\/p>\n
Vance\u2019s 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: \u201cI 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 \u2014 are all toppers. She follows in their footsteps.\u201d<\/p>\n
Her father is an engineer and her mother a microbiologist. Both are academics: Vance\u2019s mother is a provost at the University of California at San Diego, and her father lectures at San Diego State University.<\/p>\n
\u201cI 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,\u201d she said in a recent Fox News interview.<\/p>\n
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 \u201cdevoted much of her time at Yale to public education, volunteering in local elementary schools and as a Girl Scouts troop leader.\u201d<\/p>\n
Peter Hamilton, another Yale graduate who participated in the program, recalled his surprise when he walked into Vance\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was kind of intense,\u201d said Hamilton, now an assistant professor in world history at Lingnan University in Hong Kong. \u201cIt really stuck with me. \u2026 I always thought of Usha as quite serious and highly intelligent, in a well-plotted-out kind of way.\u201d<\/p>\n
Vance ended her two-year fellowship in China after only one year, according to Hamilton, enrolling in Cambridge University and earning a master\u2019s degree for her research on \u201cthe methods used for protecting printing rights in seventeenth-century England,\u201d according to the esteemed Gates Cambridge scholarship program.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s biography.<\/p>\n
\u201cPeople respected her intelligence,\u201d said Doug Lieb, who was editor in chief of the Yale Law Journal while Usha worked on the review\u2019s managing board. \u201cShe 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
Like Hamilton, Lieb still vividly recalls her organizational methods.<\/p>\n
\u201cHer notes were always, like, tabbed and highlighted and very meticulous and categorized,\u201d said Lieb, who is now a civil rights attorney in New York and attended the Vances\u2019 wedding.<\/p>\n
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 \u2014 \u201cWhat kind of Muppet are you, chaos or order?\u201d \u2014 and writing, \u201cI don\u2019t think there\u2019s any doubt that I am an Order Muppet.\u201d (Screenshots of Vance\u2019s Facebook page, which is not publicly accessible, were shared with The Post.)<\/p>\n
In an environment teeming with overachievers, Vance stood out not only for her \u201cseemingly superhuman capacity to achieve\u201d but as \u201ca kind, unassuming friend who had no trouble bridging seemingly disparate social groups,\u201d said James Eimers, a law school classmate who now works at a consulting firm that advises applicants to college and graduate school.<\/p>\n
JD and Usha met and started dating in their first year at Yale Law School. They earned the moniker \u201cJudusha,\u201d a melding of their names that came to imply \u201cawe and reverence that they were intimidating as a power couple,\u201d said Josh McLaurin, JD\u2019s former roommate, now a Democratic state senator from Georgia who has been outspoken in his criticism of the vice-presidential nominee\u2019s politics.<\/p>\n
The legacy of Yale Law\u2019s most famous power couple \u2014 Hillary and Bill Clinton \u2014 still loomed over the campus, with many students bent on mimicking what one graduate called the \u201cClinton template\u201d: several years spent burnishing elite credentials before returning to a (preferably Southern or Midwestern) home state to launch a political career.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cDriving through Arkansas, listening to Bill Clinton tell us about his life. Best road trip ever,\u201d she wrote.<\/p>\n
The post was written near Chester, a tiny town in northwestern Arkansas. She tagged a companion who accompanied her: JD Vance.<\/p>\n
Usha and JD married in Kentucky in 2014 \u2014 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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s workplace culture makes it \u201ca top contender in the cool, woke category\u201d of large legal offices, according to a January 2019 article in the American Lawyer. On its website the firm touts its \u201cDiversity, Equity and Inclusion Committee\u201d and its welcoming attitude toward \u201cintersex, transgender, non-binary, and gender nonconforming people.\u201d<\/p>\n
When Vance began working at Munger Tolles, her husband was still years away from lashing out against \u201cwoke DEI\u201d corporations and \u201cfar-left gender ideology.\u201d With the 2016 publication of his memoir, \u201cHillbilly Elegy,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
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 \u201ccultural heroin. He makes some feel better for a bit. But he cannot fix what ails them, and one day they\u2019ll realize it.\u201d<\/p>\n
In her post about that article, Vance noted her husband\u2019s \u201cfirm stand against Trump.\u201d<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s endorsement and Thiel\u2019s financial backing. Usha was not a fixture on the campaign trail, although she did star in an ad, calling him \u201can incredible father\u201d and \u201cmy best friend.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cShe doesn\u2019t crave the political spotlight, but she was very much a part of the campaign,\u201d said Chabria, the GOP strategist who worked on the 2022 race.<\/p>\n
Vance voted in her husband\u2019s 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 \u2014 funded, like her husband, by Thiel \u2014 who lost a Senate race in Arizona.<\/p>\n
After moving to Ohio, Usha Vance joined the board of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra. During her husband\u2019s 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\u2019s vice-presidential pick.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019ve never met her,\u201d Pureval said, adding that while he strongly opposes the Republican ticket, \u201cI wish her only the best.\u201d<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cHaving an Indian American potentially as the second lady is inspiring to so many,\u201d he said. \u201cI\u2019ve received countless calls, texts and emails from our community wanting to meet and support JD and Usha.\u201d<\/p>\n
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, \u201cWhat kind of values does a man have to marry somebody that far outside your race, who isn\u2019t even a Christian?\u201d<\/p>\n
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\u2019s politics.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election \u2014 as then-Vice President Mike Pence did not \u2014 by certifying fraudulent slates of electors.<\/p>\n
\u201cAm I surprised to see Usha speaking onstage at a major political convention? No. She\u2019s brilliant,\u201d said Chad Callaghan, a Los Angeles-based writer and marketing director who said he was friendly with her in college. \u201cAm 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
But she did acknowledge in passing what so many who know her said they felt as they watched her onstage: amazement.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s safe to say that neither JD nor I expected to find ourselves in this position,\u201d she said. \u201cBut it\u2019s hard to imagine a more powerful example of the American Dream. A boy from Middletown, Ohio \u2014\u201d<\/p>\n
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\u2019s name.<\/p>\n
Aaron Schaffer and Alice Crites contributed to this report.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
During her rise through America\u2019s most prestigious schools, law firms and judicial clerkships, Usha Vance rarely \u2014 if ever \u2014 volunteered her opinions on the nation\u2019s bitterly partisan politics to friends and colleagues. But she did express revulsion at former president Donald Trump\u2019s actions on Jan. 6, 2021. Vance told friends she was outraged by […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":6836,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6835","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6835","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6835"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6835\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6836"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6835"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6835"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6835"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}