JD Vance’s wife was so appalled by Donald Trump and the January 6 Capitol riot that her friends were shocked to see her supporting him for president.
Usha Chilukuri Vance introduced her husband as Trump’s running mate with a glowing speech, but before then she rarely expressed a political opinion.
The only time they recalled was when Ms Vance, an accomplished Yale-educated lawyer and daughter of Indian immigrant professionals, watched the insurrection with horror and revulsion.
Special ire was reserved for Trump himself, whom she held responsible for inciting the 2021 riot with his incendiary speech minutes earlier.
Just three years later, Ms Vance, 38, was seated next to Trump at the Republican National Convention last week as the potential future second lady.
Usha Vance introduces her husband JD Vance as the Republican nominee for vice president at the Republican National Convention last week
Friends were shocked to see Ms Vance, 38, was seated next to Trump at the Republican National Convention last week as the potential future second lady, given her political views
‘Usha found the incursion on the Capitol and Trump’s role in it to be deeply disturbing,’ a friend recalled to the Washington Post.
‘She was generally appalled by Trump, from the moment of his first election… It was surreal to see her sitting next to him last night.’
Far from expressing outrage, as she did that day, her husband is calling jailed rioters ‘political prisoners’ and supporting Trump’s false claim that the election was stolen.
Ms Vance’s entire life leading up to her convention speech appears incongruous to the position she finds herself in.
She was born to an engineer father and microbiologist mother, Hindus who emigrated from India and now live in San Diego where they lecture at universities.
Blitzing through Yale University, a teaching fellowship in China, and masters at the University of Cambridge she arrived at arriving at Yale Law School in 2010.
Described as ‘never getting a B in her life’ and known for fanatic organization, she organized her life into 15 to 30-minute intervals with color-coded post-it notes on her wall.
Vance and his wife Usha Chilukuri Vance attend a rally in St Cloud, Minnesota, on Saturday
The couple on their wedding day in Kentucky in 2014, four years after they met in law school
Ms Vance poked fun at herself in a 2012 Facebook post where she shared a Slate article asking, ‘What kind of Muppet are you, chaos or order?’
‘I don’t think there’s any doubt that I am an Order Muppet,’ she wrote in the entry shared with the Washington Post.
But she was also ‘a kind, unassuming friend who had no trouble bridging seemingly disparate social groups’, her law school classmate James Eimers said.
One time she even bought a table she didn’t need, just so a friend with a pickup truck could go get it for her and talk to the seller, a girl he had a crush on.
Yale Law was where she met Vance, at an event for first year students, and they quickly became inseparable.
Everyone who knew them agreed Vance’s relationship with his future wife hugely boosted his career, giving him the drive and skills he needed to succeed.
‘If I get a little too cocky or a little too proud, I just remind myself that she’s way more accomplished than I,’ he told Megyn Kelly in a podcast interview in 2020.
‘I’m one of those guys who really benefits from having sort of a powerful female voice over his left shoulder saying, ‘Don’t do that, do that’.’
‘It was surreal to see her sitting next to him last night,’ a friend said of Ms Vance seated alongside Trump
The couple embrace after she introduced him as Trump’s running mate at the election
By their final year, classmates called them ‘Judusha’, a portmanteau in the style of celebrity couples like Brangelina.
‘Although he’s a meat and potatoes kind of guy, he adapted to my vegetarian diet and learned to cook food from my mother, Indian food,’ Ms Vance said in her convention speech.
‘Before I knew it, he’d become an integral part of my family, a person I could not imagine living without.’
After they graduated, Ms Vance climbed the clerkship ladder, starting with District Judge Amul Thapar in Eastern Kentucky.
She then moved on to Judge Brett Kavanaugh on the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit and Chief Justice John Roberts of the Supreme Court.
They married in Kentucky in 2014, guests sitting on wooden chairs in the grass, and in another ceremony were blessed by a Hindu pandit.
The couple moved to San Francisco in 2015, Mr Vance working for conservative venture capitalist Peter Thiel at his Mithril Capital investment firm.
Usha Vance and her husband share a kiss as they stand with Trump and his wife Melania at the convention
Vance takes the stage with his wife Usha Vance during a rally at Middletown High School in his home town of Middletown, Ohio
Ms Vance was an associate at Munger, Tolles & Olson, where she was a civil litigator for clients like Disney and colleagues remembered her as a moderate.
The firm was called ‘a top contender in the cool, woke category’ by American Lawyer in 2019 and touts its DEI credentials and its welcoming attitude to ‘intersex, transgender, non-binary, and gender nonconforming people’ on its website.
During university and her law career, as well as among her friends, anyone who has spoken to the media insisted she kept her political views very close to her chest.
She appeared moderate, apolitical, and more interested in the technical aspects of her work and study.
One Facebook post from August 2012 expressed her admiration for Bill Clinton as she drove across the country with Mr Vance the summer before their senior year.
‘Driving through Arkansas, listening to Bill Clinton tell us about his life. Best road trip ever,’ she wrote.
Mr Vance shot to fame with the release of his memoir Hillbilly Elegy, about his harsh upbringing in rural Ohio and Kentucky.
But he was far from the fire-breathing conservative he is as Trump’s running mate, instead seen as center-right and good at explaining working-class white points of view to liberals.
Many of her friends are shocked by Ms Vance actively supporting Trump and her husband as they make inflammatory statements
Ms Vance shared many of her husband’s interviews following the success of the book, including an Atlantic article where he bashed Trump.
He compared Trump to ‘cultural heroin. He makes some feel better for a bit. But he cannot fix what ails them, and one day they’ll realize it.’
Ms Vance shared the article on Facebook, and pointed out that her husband made a ‘firm stand against Trump’.
These years were when Mr Vance was one of Trump’s harshest critics, even comparing him to Hitler and saying you were an ‘idiot if you voted for him’.
But that began to change when Mr Vance began his run for the Senate at the 2022 midterm elections.
His public statements lurched to the right, railing against ‘far-left gender ideology’ and ‘woke DEI’ among other of Trump’s favorite targets.
Despite owing his lifestyle to the elite institutions he got into on scholarships, he gave a speech to the National Conservatism Conference called ‘The Universities Are the Enemy’ in November 2021.
Ms Vance was not heavily involved in the campaign as she had just given birth to their third child, but appeared in an ad praising him as ‘an incredible father’ and ‘my best friend’.
‘She doesn’t crave the political spotlight, but she was very much a part of the campaign,’ Jai Chabria, a republican strategist who worked on the Vance campaign, told the Washington Post.
Republicans insisted Ms Vance’s political views had simply evolved over the past few years, just as her husband went from critic to running mate
Once Mr Vance was elected, the couple split their time between their $1.4 million home in the East Walnut Hills neighborhood of Cincinnati, and a $1.6 million house in Del Ray, in Alexandria, Virginia, when in DC for Congress.
Both are rich neighborhoods with overwhelmingly Democrat-voting populations, worlds away from Mr Vance’s upbringing.
Then on the day of the convention last week, Ms Vance resigned from her job at Munger, Tolles & Olson- surrendering to the role of political wife despite her incredible talents.
She explained at the time that she did it ‘to focus on caring for our family’.
Many of her friends are shocked by Ms Vance actively supporting Trump and her husband as they make inflammatory statements.
‘Am 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,’ former university friend Chad Callaghan said.
Chabria insisted Ms Vance’s political views had simply evolved over the past few years, just as her husband went from critic to running mate.
‘Usha 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,’ he said.