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As we hurtle toward President-elect Donald Trump’s second inauguration, the political figure that has perhaps most intrigued conservative and liberal media alike is lawyer Usha Vance, the wife of Vice President-elect J.D. Vance. Usha’s speech at the 2024 Republican National Convention may have been her entrée into establishment politics, but with four years of Trump and Vance on the horizon, we’re surely about to see a lot more of her.
Below, find four things you need to know about the soon-to-be second lady of the United States.
What is Usha Vance’s family and educational background?
Usha Vance, née Usha Bala Chilukuri, was born in San Diego to Telugu Indian immigrants in 1986. She has one sister, Shreya, and is a practicing Hindu.
She attended Mt. Carmel High School before matriculating to Yale University, where she graduated summa cum laude with a BA in history in 2007. Usha then taught English in Guangzhou, China, and attended Clare College as a Gates Cambridge Scholar before enrolling in Yale Law School, where she met J.D. Vance.
In law school, Usha was the executive development editor of the Yale Law Journal.
How did Usha Vance meet her husband?
Believe it or not, the Vances were introduced by Amy Chua, author of the controversial 2011 parenting book Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, who taught both Usha and J.D. at Yale Law School. Chua has described the couple as “extremely unlikely, almost opposites of personality,” while J.D. has referred to Usha as his “Yale spirit guide”—a reference to the help she gave him in navigating the unfamiliar terrain of their Ivy League alma mater. (J.D. described their dynamic in his 2016 memoir, Hillbilly Elegy; when it was adapted into a film by Ron Howard in 2020, Usha was portrayed by Freida Pinto.) The couple married in an interfaith ceremony in Kentucky in 2014.
Usha described her courtship with J.D. at the 2024 Republican National Convention, saying:
“I met J.D. in law school when he was fresh out of Ohio State, which he attended with the support of the GI Bill. We were friends first because, I mean, who wouldn’t want to be friends with J.D.? He was then, as now the most interesting person I knew, a working-class guy who had overcome childhood traumas that I could barely fathom to end up at Yale Law School, a tough marine who had served in Iraq, but whose idea of a good time was playing with puppies and watching the movie Babe. The most determined person I knew with one overriding ambition: to become a husband and a father, and to build the kind of tight-knit family that he had longed for as a child.”
She went on:
“When J.D. met me, he approached our differences with curiosity and enthusiasm. He wanted to know everything about me, where I came from, what my life had been like. 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. Before I knew it, he’d become an integral part of my family, a person I could not imagine living without.”
A registered Democrat in 2014, Usha voted in the Republican primary in 2022, when J.D. was running for Senate.
What has Usha Vance’s career trajectory been?
Usha clerked for several judges between 2013 and 2018 (most notable among them Brett Kavanaugh, who was appointed to the Supreme Court in 2018) before spending six years working for the San Francico-based law firm Munger, Tolles & Olson. Shortly after Trump made J.D. his vice-presidential nominee in 2024, however, Usha resigned from Munger, Tolles & Olson to “focus on caring for [her] family.”
Her bio on the firm’s website, which has since been deleted, stated that her former practice focused “on complex civil litigation and appeals in a wide variety of sectors, including higher education, local government, entertainment, and technology, including semiconductors.”
How many children do J.D. and Usha Vance have?
The Vances are parents to seven-year-old Ewan, four-year-old Vivek, and three-year-old Mirabel. “We have code names now. Our kids had a lot of fun with that,” Usha said in August 2024 of her family’s new Secret Service protection.
