Usha Vance, the wife of the Republican vice-presidential pick J.D. Vance, has officially entered the 2024 election chat. On Wednesday, Usha took the stage at the Republican National Convention, introducing her husband to thousands of Trump supporters in Wisconsin as a “working-class guy.” She described him as “the most determined person” and also “a meat-and-potatoes guy” who adapted to her vegetarian diet.
Usha’s identity as the daughter of two Indian immigrants and her résumé as a litigator who has clerked for Brett Kavanaugh and John Roberts seems at odds with some of her husband’s views. He supports building a wall along the southern border to keep immigrants out of the country and has called universal child care “a class war against normal people.” When Usha mentioned during her RNC speech that she grew up in San Diego, she received loud cheers, but when she added that she’s the daughter of Indian immigrants, the crowd — many of whom were holding signs saying “Mass Deportation Now” — remained silent. Two hours earlier, the room chanted “send them back” when Texas governor Greg Abbott said that if elected, Trump “will arrest the criminal illegal immigrants and put them behind bars or send them back.”
Here’s what to know about the possible next Second Lady of the United States.
Usha and J.D. met at Yale Law School
As she stated in her RNC speech, Usha was raised in San Diego. Her childhood classmates told the New York Times that she was a “leader” and a “bookworm.” She got her undergraduate degree in history from Yale in 2007 before earning a Gates Fellowship at Cambridge. At Cambridge, she reportedly moved in liberal and left-wing circles. She returned to Yale for law school in 2013.
In his 2016 memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, J.D. wrote that he got to know Usha and “fell hard” for her while working as writing partners in law school. “In a place that always seemed a little foreign, Usha’s presence made me feel at home,” he wrote. According to the New York Times, Usha helped J.D. “organize his ideas about social decline in rural white America,” which eventually became Hillbilly Elegy. The book was turned into a Ron Howard 2020 movie with the same title.
Usha and J.D. graduated in 2013 and got married in 2014 in Kentucky. They have three children — Ewan, Vivek, and Mirabel — names that right-wingers and white nationalists already have a lot of thoughts about.
Usha is an accomplished attorney who has mostly stayed out of the spotlight.
Usha clerked for Kavanaugh when he was an appellate judge, and she later clerked for Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts. She went on to work as an associate, then an attorney, for Munger, Tolles & Olson, a law firm that describes itself as “radically progressive.” Per the Times, as of 2014, she was a registered Democrat, but she is now a registered Republican. ABC reports that she voted in Ohio’s 2022 Republican Senate primary in Ohio — the year her husband ran for office.
During J.D.’s run for Senate in Ohio, Usha largely stayed out of the limelight, appearing occasionally at campaign events and for interviews. That already seems different this time around. In June, she and J.D. sat down with Fox & Friends for an interview in their Ohio home, though at the time she seemed unsure about her husband possibly becoming VP. Asked what issues she would support if J.D. were chosen by Trump and they won the election, she said people were getting ahead of themselves. “I’m not raring to change anything about our lives right now, but I believe in J.D., and I really love him, and so we’ll just sort of see what happens with our life.”
On Monday, minutes after Trump announced that he had chosen J.D. as his running mate, Usha resigned from her job as an attorney at Munger, Tolles & Olson. She told People that “in light of today’s news,” she was leaving her job “to focus on caring for our family.”