As the spotlight turns to former President Donald Trump’s newly announced vice presidential pick, JD Vance, many are learning for the first time that his wife, Usha Chilukuri Vance, is an Indian American woman — and the daughter of immigrants.
Usha Vance is a successful lawyer who grew up in San Diego and met her husband while they were both studying at Yale Law School. They married in 2014 and have three children together: Ewan, 6; Vivek, 4; and Mirabel, 2.
Public records show Usha Vance voted in Democratic primaries as recently as 2014, but she voted in the 2022 Republican primary when her husband was running.
After she clerked for Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, she spent years working at the law firm Munger, Tolles & Olson, whose diversity initiatives and workplace structure have been described as “woke” and “radically progressive.”
She has recently informed them she will be leaving her job, the firm told NBC News.
Usha Vance is also a practicing Hindu, and JD Vance credits her and her faith with pushing him to reconnect with Christianity in his adulthood.
“I did grow up in a religious household, my parents are Hindu, and I think that was one of the things that made them such good parents, that make them really very good people,” she said in a recent interview with Fox News. “I knew that JD was searching for something. This just felt right for him.”
JD Vance, the Republican junior senator from Ohio, is perhaps most famous for his memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy,” which was published in 2016 and made into a Netflix film in 2020. The story documents his upbringing in a poor, Appalachian family — and the beginnings of his relationship with Usha, played in the movie by “Slumdog Millionaire” star Freida Pinto.
He describes her as his “Yale spirit guide,” having played a vital role in supporting and encouraging him in his studies and career.
In a 2017 interview with NBC News, JD Vance’s former Yale Law professor Amy Chua described their relationship as “extremely unlikely, almost opposites of personality.”
Before he was a senator, the GOP vice presidential pick was a vocal critic of Trump, even describing himself as “a ‘never Trump’ guy.”
“I never liked him,” he told Charlie Rose in 2016 while promoting his book.
But his position softened during his campaign for Senate in 2022, in which he accepted an endorsement from the former president. As a senator, he’s taken far-right stances on issues like immigration, abortion, climate change and the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot.
At a Senate Banking Committee hearing last week, JD Vance cited immigration as one of the foremost causes of financial hardship in the U.S., including that immigrants are taking jobs from American citizens.
In the interview with Fox News, Usha Vance made it clear that she’s not a fan of the spotlight.
“I don’t know that anyone is ever ready for that kind of scrutiny,” she said. “I’m not raring to change anything about our lives right now. But I believe in JD and I really love him. So we’ll just sort of see what happens with our life.”
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