JD Vance has had several introductions to the American people: as the author of a memoir on what ails the White working class, as a newly elected Republican senator in his home state of Ohio and, on Monday, as his party’s nominee for vice president.
His wife, Usha, has been by his side through it all.
As the Ohio delegation chanted her husband’s name on the Republican convention floor in Milwaukee, Usha Vance stood beside the first-term senator and applauded as he was nominated by voice vote to be Donald Trump’s running mate.
Weeks earlier, the trial lawyer and former judicial clerk admitted she wasn’t “raring” to completely upend the life she and her husband had built together or to face the attention that would follow.
“I don’t know that anyone is ever ready for that kind of scrutiny,” she told Fox News last month during a joint interview with the senator at their home in Ohio. “I think we found the first campaign that he embarked on to be a shock. It was so different from anything we’d ever done before. But it was an adventure.”
She added that she was open to seeing how things unfolded.
Now, with JD Vance as Trump’s vice presidential nominee, the couple has embarked on a journey even bigger than the 2022 Senate campaign in Ohio.
Trump’s selection of the senator, who is nearly half his age and has three young children with his wife, has infused the ticket with a burst of youthfulness that could be a benefit during a cycle defined by the advanced age of the two major-party nominees.
But the senator, who has only been in office since January 2023, is likely to face questions over both his lack of political experience and his transition from 2016 Trump critic to heir to the MAGA movement. If his 2022 Senate campaign is any indication, Usha Vance may play an understated but key role in helping introduce him to the public.
“Sometimes people say that he’s changed a lot, but the truth is I’ve known him now for so many years, and he’s always been so true to himself,” she told Newsmax during a 2022 interview with her husband.
For years, the senator has described his wife as a key part of his success, dating back to when the two attended law school together at Yale University, where Usha Vance also graduated summa cum laude with a bachelor’s degree.
In his 2016 memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy,” JD Vance described her as his “Yale spirit guide,” helping him navigate life at the elite university where they met.
“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,” he wrote. The two were married in an interfaith ceremony in Kentucky in 2014 – Usha Vance’s family is Hindu, while her husband converted to Catholicism in 2019.
The daughter of Indian immigrants, Usha Chilukuri grew up in a suburb of San Diego. After college – two stints at Yale and a masters of philosophy at the University of Cambridge – she has clerked for two Supreme Court justices – Brett Kavanaugh when he served on the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit and Chief Justice John Roberts.
In 2015, she started as an associate at Munger, Tolles & Olson, a law firm with offices in Los Angeles, San Francisco and Washington, DC. She continued working at the firm between clerkships, where – according to an archived version of her employee biography – she handled “complex civil litigation and appeals” in sectors that included “higher education, local government, entertainment, and technology, including semiconductors.”
The firm announced Monday that she had resigned.
“Usha has informed us she has decided to leave the firm,” the company said in a statement. “Usha has been an excellent lawyer and colleague, and we thank her for her years of work and wish her the best in her future career.”
