Usha Vance shaped her husband’s rise. This week, she introduced him on the RNC stage.

Usha Chilukuri Vance, wife of J.D. Vance speaks on stage on the third day of the Republican National Convention at the Fiserv Forum on July 17, 2024 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. (Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

Originally published by The 19th

In less than a decade, J.D. Vance burst into the national consciousness with a bestselling memoir, a seat in the U.S. Senate and, on Monday, the Republican Party nomination for vice president.

His wife, Usha Vance, has been a key influence in her husband’s career trajectory — and a highly successful attorney who has occupied some of the most prestigious spaces in the legal world.

Both Usha Vance and J.D. Vance spoke in primetime on Wednesday, the third night of the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee.

The couple has made a rapid ascent from the liberal, privileged world of Yale Law School to the heights of Republican politics and a conservative movement led by former President Donald Trump that fervently rebukes elite institutions and those who are a part of them.

“It’s safe to say that neither J.D. nor I expected to find ourselves in this position,” Usha Vance said in introducing her husband. “But it’s hard to imagine a more powerful example of the American dream: A boy from Middletown, Ohio, raised by his grandmother through tough times, chosen to help lead our country through some of its greatest challenges.”

J.D. Vance, 39, an author and former venture capitalist, was elected to the U.S. Senate from his home state of Ohio in 2022.

As a young multiracial couple, the Vances offer a marked contrast from the family dynamics of past Republican running mates, most of whom have been older and white. If Trump and J.D. Vance are elected, Usha Vance, 38, would be the first non-white second lady.

The couple, who married in 2014 and have three young children, met in law school and came from very different backgrounds.

JD Vance’s childhood in southwestern Ohio was marked by poverty, instability and addiction, as he recounted in his bestselling 2016 memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy.” After serving in the Marine Corps, he attended Ohio State University before matriculating at Yale Law.

Usha Vance, then Usha Chilukuri, grew up in the San Diego suburbs as the child of Indian immigrants — her father an engineer and her mother a biologist and now a college provost. She attended Yale for her undergraduate degree and earned a postgraduate degree at Cambridge University on a prestigious Gates Cambridge scholarship.

In “Hillbilly Elegy,” J.D. Vance recalled falling “hard” for Usha Vance when the two were paired together on an assignment in their first year. Usha Vance, he wrote, “occupied an entirely different emotional universe” from his past relationships. After just one date, he told her he was in love with her.

“She seemed some sort of genetic anomaly, a combination of every positive quality a human should have — bright, hardworking, tall, and beautiful,” he wrote. “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.”

Usha Vance said the fact that she and J.D. Vance met, fell in love and got married “is a testament to this great country.” She recalled getting to know her husband first as a friend, describing him as “a tough Marine who had served in Iraq, but his idea of a good time was playing with puppies and watching the movie ‘Babe.’”

“When J.D. met me, he approached our differences with curiosity and enthusiasm,” Usha Vance said. “Although he’s a meat and potatoes kind of guy, he adapted to my vegetarian diet and learned to cook food for my mother — Indian food. Before I knew it, he’d become an integral part of my family, a person I could not imagine living without.”

She added: “The J.D. I knew then is the same J.D. you see today, except for that beard.”

J.D. Vance described Usha Vance as his “Yale spirit guide,” helping him navigate an elite world in which he often felt out of place. Usha Vance was also by his side in his 2022 Senate campaign, when J.D. Vance, a onetime Trump critic, began embracing Trump’s brand of right-wing politics.

J.D. Vance was mentored by the prominent law professor Amy Chua, who urged him to write “Hillbilly Elegy.” The book, published months before the 2016 election, became a New York Times bestseller and was later adapted into a film directed by Ron Howard, in which actress Freida Pinto played Usha Vance.

At Yale, Chua was known for helping students through the process of securing prestigious judicial clerkships. But in “Hillbilly Elegy” and an interview with The Atlantic in 2017, J.D. Vance recalled how when he applied for a clerkship with a high-powered federal judge, Chua warned him the clerkship was “the type of thing that destroys relationships.”

“Amy’s advice stopped me from making a life-altering decision. It prevented me from moving a thousand miles away from the person I eventually married,” he wrote.

After law school, both Vances clerked for judges in northern Kentucky, where they were married “by their judicial bosses,” J.D. Vance wrote.

J.D. Vance briefly practiced for the firm Sidley Austin, but left the law for venture capital, working at Peter Thiel’s firm Mithril Capital in San Francisco for a brief time before the couple moved back to Ohio.

Usha Vance went on to a successful and prestigious legal career that included clerking for now-Justice Brett Kavanaugh when he served on the U.S. Court of Appeals and Chief Justice John Roberts on the U.S. Supreme Court.

She practiced for the white-shoe law firm Munger, Tolles & Olsen LLP until Monday, when she resigned upon J.D. Vance’s nomination as running mate.

Friends and colleagues of Usha Vance who spoke to The New York Times in 2022 said she rarely discussed politics and that her political views were often difficult to discern.

J.D. Vance’s hard right turn and embrace of Trump’s politics have surprised and dismayed many of the Vances’ former friends and classmates, The Times reported. 

Faith is important to both Vances: J.D. Vance converted to Catholicism in 2019, and Usha Vance is Hindu. Her most significant influence, though, may have been in J.D. Vance’s emotional development and ability to maintain relationships.

In “Hillbilly Elegy,” J.D. Vance describes how his chaotic and unstable upbringing, marked by constant fighting, left him emotionally wounded and unable to navigate conflicts and communicate in a healthy way.

Early in their relationship, he wrote that Usha Vance likened him to a turtle, withdrawing at the first sign of disagreement: “The thought of fighting with her reduced me to a morass of qualities I thought I hadn’t inherited from my family: stress, sadness, fear, anxiety. It was all there, and it was intense.”

In his “worst moments,” Vance wrote, “I convince myself there is no exit, and no matter how much I fight my demons, they are as much of an inheritance as my blue eyes and brown hair.”

“The sad fact is that I couldn’t do it without Usha,” he continued. “Even at my best, I’m a delayed explosion — I can be defused, but only with skill and precision. It’s not just that I’ve learned to control myself but that Usha has learned how to manage me. Put two of me in the same home and you have a positively radioactive situation.”

The post Usha Vance shaped her husband’s rise. This week, she introduced him on the RNC stage. appeared first on SC Daily Gazette.