Usha Vance: Who is the wife of vice-president JD Vance as she heads to Greenland?
Usha Vance is to visit Greenland, the autonomous territory of the kingdom of Denmark, which President Donald Trump has set his sights on.
She will be part of a US delegation that will arrive on Thursday and “visit historic sites”, “learn about Greenlandic heritage” and watch Avannaata Qimussersu, Greenland’s national dogsled race. The national security adviser, Mike Waltz, is also part of the delegation.
The second lady of the US has increasingly come into the public eye since the inauguration of the president in January. On March 13 Ms Vance was given a rude reception in her new job as a board member at the Kennedy Center. She was booed by a classical music audience as she took her seat alongside her vice-president husband – some of whom had become angry that they had “ruined” the US equivalent of the National Theatre.
Ms Vance was put on the centre’s board by Mr Trump, who had previously declared his intention to move away from the “woke” programming he considered to be on offer.
It was one of the first public acts as second lady of the US, in what would have once been a completely unexpected role for her, given her husband had described himself as a “never Trump guy” before becoming a leftfield appointment as his VP in July 2024.
A 40-year-old former venture capitalist, Mr Vance made a name for himself with his bestselling 2016 memoir Hillbilly Elegy, which details his blue-collar upbringing in white, working-class America.
Mr Vance has been quick to point to the stellar credentials of his wife and says he feels “humbled” by her achievements.
A graduate from Yale and Cambridge, Ms Vance has worked as a corporate litigator at a prestigious San Francisco law firm, as well as clerking for conservative Supreme Court judges John G Roberts Jr and Brett Kavanaugh, when the latter was an appeals court judge.
Republican US Senate candidate JD Vance speaks to supporters with Usha Vance at an election watch party in 2022
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Ms Vance wields considerable influence over her husband’s political moves, he himself has said.
However, the 39-year-old’s glittering career as a high-profile lawyer, and her liberal-leaning university friendship circles, somewhat fly in the face of her husband’s anti-establishment, populist brand. In 2021, he gave a keynote speech at the National Conservatism Conference speech titled The Universities are the Enemy, and has railed against women working “90 hours a week in a cubicle at the New York Times or Goldman Sachs”.
JD Vance and his wife Usha celebrate as he is nominated for the office of vice-president
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Here’s everything you need to know about Usha Vance.
The daughter of immigrants who got into elite universities
The daughter of Indian immigrants, Ms Vance, born Usha Chilukuri, grew up in Rancho Peñasquitos, an aspirational suburb of San Diego. Her parents, a mechanical engineer and a biologist, were part of a tight circle of Indian-American academics and professionals.
Friends from Ms Vance’s schooldays have described her as a “leader” and a “bookworm”, according to the New York Times. “By age five or six, she had assumed a leadership role,” Vikram Rao, a close family friend of Ms Vance’s, told the paper.
“She decided which board games we were going to play and what the rules were going to be. She was never mean or unkind but she was the boss.”
JD and Usha Vance at an election night event at Duke Energy Convention Center after winning the primary on May 3, 2022
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This ambition and drive were evident when, at 17, she was one of a group of high schoolers taking part in a trivia competition interviewed by the San Diego Union-Tribune. “It’s not enough to know the answers,” she told the paper, “you have to do it fast.”
After graduating from high school, Ms Vance enrolled at Yale to study history, where she spent four years, before obtaining a Gates Fellowship at Cambridge to research the origins of copyright law, receiving a master of philosophy in 2010.
‘My Yale spirit guide’ – meeting JD Vance
It was when Usha returned to Yale in 2013, this time to study law, that she met her husband. The pair both joined a discussion group on “social decline in white America”.
“She seemed some sort of genetic anomaly, a combination of every positive quality a human being should have: bright, hardworking, tall, and beautiful,” her husband wrote in his now famous memoir. “I joked with a buddy that if she had possessed a terrible personality, she would have made an excellent heroine in an Ayn Rand novel, but she had a great sense of humor and an extraordinarily direct way of speaking.”
On the surface, it seemed to outsiders that the outgoing Mr Vance and the shy Ms Chilukuri may have seemed an odd pairing. But she would go on to become instrumental in Mr Vance’s political success.
Inspired by their discussion group, the reading list for which included papers such as Urban Appalachian Children: An ‘Invisible’ Minority in City Schools, she helped Mr Vance organise his ideas for his breakout memoir Hillbilly Elegy. In 2020, the book was adapted into a Netflix film directed by Ron Howard, and Ms Vance was played by the glamorous actress Freida Pinto.
JD Vance and his wife Usha Vance arrive on the first day of the 2024 Republican National Convention
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“Usha was like my Yale spirit guide,” he wrote in Hillbilly Elegy of his wife. “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.”
The pair were married in an interfaith ceremony in Kentucky in 2014 – Usha Vance’s family is Hindu, while her husband converted to Catholicism in 2019. They have three children – sons Ewan and Vivek and a daughter, Mirabel.
In 2018, the couple moved from San Francisco to Ohio, purchasing a $1.4 million Victorian Gothic house built in 1858 in an affluent neighbourhood in Cincinnati.
“Usha definitely brings me back to Earth a little bit,” Mr Vance told the Megyn Kelly Show podcast in 2020. “And if I maybe get a little bit too cocky or a little too proud I just remind myself that she is way more accomplished than I am.”
“People don’t realise just how brilliant she is,” he added, saying that his wife is able to read a 1,000-page book in only a few hours. “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.’”
A lawyer at a ‘radically progressive’ firm
In 2015 Ms Vance joined Munger, Tolles & Olson, working as a litigator in the San Francisco and Washington, DC offices, according to the company’s website on her now-defunct profile page.
After leaving the firm in 2017, she went on to serve as a law clerk for the Supreme Court until 2018. While at the Supreme Court, Ms Vance clerked for Brett Kavanaugh, now a Supreme Court justice, while he was on the District of Columbia court of appeals, and then for Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts. Both men are part of the Supreme Court’s conservative majority.
She returned to Munger, Tolles & Olson in January 2019, where her practice focused on “complex civil litigation and appeals in a wide variety of sectors, including higher education, local government, entertainment, and technology, including semiconductors”, according to the company website. The firm announced in July that she had resigned.
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Vance embraces his wife after winning the Ohio primary in May 2022
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However, much of her career is seemingly at odds with her husband’s populist, anti-establishment rhetoric. Ms Vance’s ex-law firm describes its corporate culture as “radically progressive”, and a 2019 article in The American Lawyer placed its diverse hiring practices in the “cool, woke category”. According to two anonymous colleagues, Ms Vance was perceived by at work as liberal or moderate, the New York Times reported.
In stark contrast, Mr Vance delayed the confirmation of state department roles by sending nominees a questionnaire to determine whether they were too “woke”. In June 2022, two days after the Supreme Court struck down Roe vs Wade, Mr Vance tweeted: “If your worldview tells you that it’s bad for women to become mothers but liberating for them to work 90 hours a week in a cubicle at the New York Times or Goldman Sachs, you’ve been had.”
A political enigma: from registered Democrat to Republican donor
It is part of a wider image of Ms Vance as something of a political cypher. At Cambridge, friends told the New York Times that she moved in mostly liberal and left-wing circles, including a handful of Marxists. As of as recently as 2014, she was a registered Democrat.
While to many, Ms Vance’s sparkling academic CV may be impressive, it may not appeal to much of the Republican base’s anti-intellectual movement. In 2021, Mr Vance gave a keynote speech at the National Conservatism Conference speech titled The Universities Are the Enemy.
JD and Usha Vance arrive on the floor during the first day of the 2024 Republican National Convention
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But, since her husband began seeking the Ohio senate seat in 2022, Usha has embarked on something of a political rebrand. In December 2021, she gave money to Blake Masters, an Arizona senate candidate and a fellow national conservative, Federal Election Commission (FEC) records show. It is her only political contribution on the FEC’s record.
In August 2022, the Vances made the decision to appear together on Newsmax, the ultra-right wing news channel – further to the right than Fox News – which refused to call the 2020 presidential race for Joe Biden for more than a month after the election. That year, Newsmax published a piece with the headline Whatever They’re Teaching at Yale Law School, It’s Frightening.
Ms Vance’s metamorphosis somewhat mirrors her husband’s own political trajectory. Once a never Trumper, he has variously referred to the president as “America’s Hitler”, an “idiot”, “reprehensible” and a “cynical asshole”. Only a few short years later, he has transformed into one of Trump’s most loyal allies.
“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,” Ms Vance told Newsmax.
