JD Vance couldn’t find his wife. It was January 2023 and he had just been sworn in by Vice President Kamala Harris as the junior senator from Ohio, in front of a group of family and friends. “You guys have to tell her that I gave this incredibly emotional set of remarks about her,” he joked
As if on cue, Usha Vance, then a practicing lawyer at a white-shoe firm, entered into the room, pushing one of the couple’s three children in a stroller. JD’s face lit up. He pointed in her direction, seizing upon his wife’s sacrifices.
“The thing that I’ll say about running for office that a lot of you know very well is that it takes an incredible toll on family,” the author-turned-MAGA-firebrand continued. “I am going to try to not get too emotional here, but just say to get to represent the people of Ohio in the United States Senate is a dream come true for me, and I wouldn’t be here without Usha. So thank you, honey, from the bottom of my heart.”
It’s a hackneyed throwaway, but one and a half years later, Usha’s role in her husband’s meteoric ascent is the subject of much intrigue as he vies to be second-in-line to the world’s most powerful position.
JD told a friend around 2016 that Usha planned to vote for Hillary Clinton over his current running mate—not entirely a surprise since Usha was registered as a Democrat in the past. The New York Times reported that her parents remain registered as Democrats, and that Usha’s mother, Lakshmi Chilukuri, had once signed an open letter to then-President Trump requesting he not back out of the Paris Climate Accords.
Usha has spent nearly half of her adult life in elite universities, including two stints at Yale and a fellowship at Cambridge University. Munger, Tolles & Olson, the ritzy law firm where she litigated for nearly eight years, is known for its progressive workplace values and left-leaning lawyers.
Now, with fewer than 80 days until America decides whether to hand the keys to Number One Observatory Circle to the Vances, Usha is publicly on-board with the MAGA agenda. “There’s no daylight there,” insisted Jai Chabria, a friend of the Vances and one of JD’s early political advisors.
Someone who has known the couple for over a decade said they viewed the two as “a joint venture.”
“I just don’t think they’d be doing this if she wasn’t ok with it,” this person added.
The Vance-Chilukuri venture began at Yale Law School. Usha, the daughter of Indian immigrant academics, was paired with JD, a Marine veteran with working-class roots, for a writing assignment. “He was so nervous because he thought, ‘She’s going to realize that I’m not as smart as her and not like me,” one classmate recalled. Within months, they began dating—and quickly became a popular on-campus couple.
Usha had assembled an impressive résumé even before entering law school in the fall of 2010. After her senior year in college, she landed a competitive Yale-China Fellowship and followed that up with a Gates Cambridge Scholarship.
“I never thought of her as someone who would run for office,” said a Yale Law classmate. “I thought of her more as someone who’d be a partner at a law firm—definitely very successful with immense amount of power—but more behind-the-scenes power. But in that way, they’re the perfect combination because he always did like the spotlight.”
JD was an outspoken conservative but Usha was more coy about her politics, according to classmates. One Yale Law School graduate said they were surprised when they discovered she had scored a job as a clerk for Chief Justice John Roberts not because of her qualifications, but due to his politics. “It wasn’t something that seemed to me to be a hint at her ideological leanings. It seemed more just a showing of her ambition.”
JD’s journey to Mar-a-Lago involved a pinball machine career of sorts. After graduating, he worked for white shoe law firm Sidley Austin, invested in companies under billionaires Peter Thiel and Steve Case, wrote a New York Times best-selling memoir, appeared on cable news as a paid contributor, started his own venture fund and, of course, ran for political office (bankrolled, in part, by Thiel). He has never held a position for as long as he’ll be expected to serve as vice president in a potential Trump administration.
Usha, meanwhile, spent most of her professional career at Munger, Tolles & Olson. She was drawn to the firm, in part, for its family and gender policies, according to one person familiar with her career decision. Munger Tolles’ website also states that “diversity, equity and inclusion have always been—and continue to be—a cornerstone of our firm.”
The day after JD got the nod, Usha quit her prestigious job at Munger Tolles. There is no longer a trace of her on the company website — her entire hard won career there vaporized overnight. As of Friday, Munger Tolles has not responded to a request for comment from The Daily Beast on whether they would welcome her back if she wanted to return.
Her influence on JD continued after Yale. Although everyone agrees that Usha has little appetite for the daily grind of politics, the 38-year-old has aided her husband’s political career behind-the-scenes, according to interviews with people who know her.
After the 2016 release of Hillbilly Elegy, which catapulted JD onto the national stage, Usha avoided the limelight. However, she assisted with managing his post-Hillbilly fame, according to a person who knew them at the time.
“When she was still obviously working full-time and he was doing the media rounds following the success of his book, she was organizing and keeping track of his calendar and I think doing a lot of that communication for him,” this person said.
Someone who knows the couple says coming within a heartbeat of the presidency is the next—and perhaps penultimate—rung on the ladder of the Vances’ ambition.
In a written statement provided to The Daily Beast from the campaign, Chabria said: “There are a lot of clout chasers who claim to know JD and Usha. These people are unfortunately only concerned with status and ambition, and that’s the lens through which these sad people view the world.”
Usha helped craft JD’s RNC speech, which focused heavily on his family to appeal to blue-collar voters—tenets of his Hillbilly Elegy speaking-tour days.
“I know Usha had spent a ton of time talking it through with him and making sure it was in his voice and it was what he wanted to say and how he wanted to be remembered,” Dan Driscoll, a close friend of the couple and advisor to Vance’s campaign, told The Daily Beast. “As a thought partner, she has absolutely sharpened his thoughts.”
(But don’t expect Usha to become more of a presence on her husband’s cross-country vote-hunting trek, Driscoll added, citing her aversion to campaigning.)
Expectations for JD’s speech were perhaps unfairly high, but it did not land the way most hoped. As the Trump campaign has lost steam in recent weeks, the vice-presidential pick hasn’t been a counterweight. Instead, his old comments about “childless cat ladies” and love of Diet Mountain Dew have come to define JD’s public image. His aggregate unfavorable rating is nine points higher than his favorables, according to polling website 538.
Usha addressed the negative press during a recent appearance on Fox & Friends, telling Ainsley Earhardt, “That can be hard. Sometimes I don’t see it all and sometimes I do see it and I look at it and think well this is not the JD I know”
Driscoll said the Vances view the negative press surrounding JD’s roll-out as “biased” and it has “hardened their resolve that they need to be out telling the true story and letting the world see the actual, real JD.”
“My perception is it’s kind of further strengthened their relationship as they realize that together they’re going to have to navigate these very complicated, unfair, and wildly unbalanced waters,” he added.
Usha’s stand-by-your-man posture is also molded, in part, by another important figure in her life who underwent bareknuckle political warfare: Brett Kavanaugh, whom Usha had also clerked for when he was a circuit judge. Kavanaugh and his wife, Ashley Estes Kavanaugh, jointly sat for a televised interview ahead of Christine Blasey Ford’s Capitol Hill testimony, in which the Stanford Medical Professor accused him of sexual assault. Usha has said she views the hearings—and how Kavanaugh’s wife conducted herself—as a lodestar for how to weather political maelstroms.
“I do think that gave us a little bit of insight of what it might be like,” Usha told Earhardt in her Fox interview. “I look back at it and I think about Mrs. Kavanaugh and the way that she carried herself and it showed a lot of strength and it’s a model for the way to proceed.”
Usha discussed her feelings about the scandal at the time, according to one friend. “Being at the center of a culture war not of my creation isn’t my favorite,” the friend recalled her saying.
Dodging the 2024 culture wars and delighting in a 0.1 per cent lifestyle wouldn’t be a hard lift for the couple. The Wall Street Journal recently reported that the Vance’s are worth between $4 million and $10.4 million; they own multimillion-dollar homes in Cincinnati (a pre-Civil War house on two-plus acres) and Alexandria, Virginia. “They want a certain lifestyle for themselves,” said someone who knew the couple. “Both of their homes are in very wealthy, progressive communities.”
One friend who has spent much time with the couple said that if Usha was really uncomfortable by the hard-right turn, she would have bailed by now. “She is close with her family. If she didn’t want to be doing this, her out is very easy,” this person said. “It’s hard for me to imagine her being trapped.”
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