Who is Usha Vance? Trump’s vice president’s wife and family choose JD Vance

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TThey were tapped as writing partners for their first major assignment at Yale Law School – a flamboyant, high-achieving daughter of immigrants and a Navy veteran “hillbilly” who could trace his family’s Scots-Irish roots back through generations of Appalachian mountains.

It may sound corny and cheesy, but Usha Chilukuri and JD Vance truly came from completely different worlds. And they fell in love again—in an East Coast Ivy League across the country, from Usha’s childhood home in California and across a gaping cultural divide from her future husband’s Rust Belt hometown.

In less than 15 years, the couple, now the Vances, have taken two families’ American dreams to new heights as they compete for the White House alongside the 45th president.

And it all started in an on-campus class — where Vance quickly “found it difficult,” he writes in his 2016s Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis.

“As luck would have it, we were chosen as partners for our first major writing assignment, so we spent a lot of time in the first year getting to know each other,” Vance wrote.

“She seemed to be some kind of genetic anomaly, a combination of all the positive qualities a person should have: smart, hard-working, tall and beautiful… she had a great sense of humor and an exceptionally direct way of speaking.”

Vance grew up in Middletown, Ohio, struggling with family issues in a clan that came from Jackson, Kentucky, and held to Appalachian traditions and values. It was a triumph for him to earn a bachelor’s degree from Ohio State after four years in the Marines, and an even greater coup to found Yale Law School.

For Usha, whose Indian immigrant parents are both professors, the path was more natural; After excelling academically in her youth in suburban San Diego, she also attended Yale for a bachelor’s degree. There she graduated summa cum laude in history before studying as a Gates Cambridge scholarship holder in England, where she earned a Master of Philosophy at an early age in modern history.

Upon her return to New Haven, Vance writes, Usha acted as his “Yale spirit guide” who “knew all the best cafes and restaurants.”

“But her knowledge went much deeper: she instinctively understood the questions I couldn’t even ask, and she always encouraged me to look for opportunities I didn’t know existed,” he writes – and advises him, to keep the office hours. for example, so that he could benefit from the engagement between professor and student that was “part of the experience.”

“In a place that always seemed a little strange to me, Usha’s presence made me feel at home.”

The relationship started as a friendship; the year after Hillbilly ElegyIn the magazine’s release – and just weeks before the birth of her first child – Usha opened up about her own first impressions.

“We took all of our classes together and so I saw him for several hours a day,” she told NBC News in 2017. “And then we were tasked with working together on a briefing. We were friends and I liked that he was very diligent and showed up at around 9 a.m. appointments that I set up so we could start working on the brief together.”

However, Vance was already blown away.

“I had dated other girls, some seriously, some not,” he writes. “But Usha lived in a completely different emotional universe. I thought about her constantly. One friend described me as “sorrowful” and another told me he had never seen me like that.

“Towards the end of our first year, I found out Usha was single and immediately asked her out. After a few weeks of flirting and a single date, I told her I was in love with her. It went against all the rules of modern dating that I had learned as a young man, but I didn’t care.”

His gamble paid off and the two began a lasting relationship, nurtured by Yale professor Amy Chua, author of 2011 Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother – who also encouraged Vance to write his memoirs.

“He describes it as ‘a lightning strike’ — and that’s what I saw,” Chua told NBC in 2017, calling the pair an “extremely unlikely” pairing. “I mean, I’ve never seen anyone so impressed. It was love at first sight.”

When Vance considered a federal clerkship, Chua advised him to forget about it – partly to keep Usha in his life.

“She knew I had a new girlfriend and that I was crazy about her,” Vance writes, echoing Chua’s words: “This clerkship is the kind of thing that destroys relationships. If you want my advice, I think you should prioritize Usha and figure out a career move that actually suits you.”

He withdrew his application – and he and Usha decided to complete the traineeship together. Both landed in northern Kentucky, not far from his birthplace. They liked their bosses in the judiciary so much that years later they eventually asked them to officiate the couple’s wedding – although up to that point everything hadn’t been easy.

At my post-clerkship law school, “there were signs that things weren’t going well, particularly in my relationship with Usha,” Vance writes.

“I had no idea how to deal with relationship problems, so I decided not to bother with it at all. I could yell at her if she did something I didn’t like, but that seemed mean. Or I could retreat and escape… The thought of arguing with her sank me into a morass of traits I didn’t think I inherited from my family: stress, sadness, fear, restlessness. It was all there, and that was it intensive.

“So I tried to escape, but Usha wouldn’t let me,” he writes. “I tried to break it off several times, but she told me that was stupid unless I didn’t take care of her…Usha hadn’t learned how to fight in the backwoods school of hard knocks.

“When I first visited her family for Thanksgiving, I was amazed at the lack of drama. Usha’s mother did not complain about her father behind his back. There was no evidence that good family friends were liars or backstabbers, and there were no angry arguments between a man’s wife and the same man’s sister. Usha’s parents seemed to really like her grandmother and spoke fondly of her siblings.”

Usha taught him not only about Yale, but also about healthy relationships—and more practical things, too, like how to properly use utensils in front of potential employers at fancy dinners: “Go from outside to inside and don’t use the same utensil .” for separate courts; Oh, and use the big spoon for the soup.’

The couple’s relationship continued and grew throughout the remainder of law school, and their families met for the first time at their graduation. The young lawyers then moved to Cincinnati, Ohio, for a year-long clerkship, where they built a house in eastern Kentucky with two dogs and married in an interfaith ceremony. Usha was raised Hindu while Vance was raised in the Christian tradition. At the time of her marriage, she was a registered Democrat.

“My entire family was present for the occasion and we both changed our names to Vance,” his maternal grandparents’ last name, he writes.

Usha pursued a career in corporate litigation before landing a job as a Supreme Court clerk – which she began a month after the birth of the couple’s first child, Ewan Blaine Vance, in June 2017.

“I think we kind of emotionally convinced ourselves that the next year was going to be pretty chaotic,” Vance told NBC in the weeks before Ewan’s birth. “And I look at it as a classic hillbilly thing: You don’t plan your life around the baby, you plan your life around the baby, and we’ll figure it out.”

The couple had two more children as Vance became more famous – Vivek, born in 2020, the same year as the film adaptation of Hillbilly Elegy; and Mirabel, born in 2021, a year before her father was first elected to office as a Republican to fill a Senate seat in Ohio.

Usha, a mother of three young children and a legal career of her own, has appeared with her husband but has not been overly visible during his political career so far. According to her LinkedIn profile, she is also on the board of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra.

She did, however, star in a Senate campaign ad for her husband – “where my favorite person tells my story,” Vance posted alongside the video on Instagram.

In an interview with Fox News, she said her husband’s first campaign – for the Senate – was “a shock.”

“It was so different than anything we had done before,” she said. “But it was an adventure.”

Following Trump’s vice presidential announcement, she resigned from the law firm Munger, Tolles & Olson, where she had focused on areas such as higher education, local government, entertainment and technology. The Washington Post reported – citing an archived version of her professional biography that has now been removed.

“Usha has informed us that she has decided to leave the firm,” Munger, Tolles & Olson said in a statement Monday. “Usha was an excellent lawyer and colleague and we thank her for her years of work and wish her all the best in her future career.”

Meanwhile, Usha made a statement to SFGate; The company has offices in San Francisco.

“In light of today’s news, I have resigned from my position at Munger, Tolles & Olson to focus on taking care of our family,” said the 38-year-old. “I am eternally grateful for the opportunities I have had at Munger and the outstanding colleagues and friends I have worked with over the years.”

If the Senate campaign was “a shock” and “an adventure,” one can only imagine what awaits Usha and the Vance family as they jump into the Trump fight. Usha seemed philosophical in a recent interview with Fox ahead of the announcement.

“I don’t really feel like changing anything about our lives right now, but I believe in JD and I really love him,” she said. “And so we’ll just see what happens with our lives. We’re open.”