Usha Vance, wife of Donald Trump’s VP pick, was once a Democrat
J.D. VANCE, the Republican vice-presidential candidate, introduced himself to America in a 37-minute prime-time address at the Republican National Convention (RNC) on July 17th. But before his lengthy speech, which seamlessly blended a storybook biography with populist politics, millions of Americans briefly heard from his wife, Usha Chilukuri Vance. “When J.D. met me, he approached our differences with curiosity and enthusiasm,” she said. “He wanted to know everything about me, where I came from, what my life had been like.”
Ms Vance, 38 years old, had a distinctly different upbringing from her husband. While Mr Vance was raised in a socially dysfunctional white working-class family in Ohio, she grew up comfortably middle-class in a diverse suburb of San Diego, California. Her parents, Indian immigrants who moved to San Diego in the 1970s, remain in southern California and teach molecular biology and engineering. Her extended family in India includes several noted academics.
“I did grow up in a religious household,” Ms Vance said in a recent interview with Fox News. “My parents are Hindu and that is one of the things that made them such good parents, that made them really good people. And so I have seen the power of that.” Mr Vance, who converted to Catholicism several years ago, has said that his wife had helped him re-engage with his own Christian faith.
Ms Vance’s life is a particularly stellar example of what most immigrants to America would hope for their children. She earned a bachelor’s degree from Yale and won a prestigious Gates Fellowship at Cambridge University. She then studied at Yale Law, where she met Mr Vance, a Marine Corps veteran and graduate of Ohio State University.
“Usha was like my Yale spirit guide,” Mr Vance wrote in his bestselling memoir. “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.” Ms Vance said in her RNC speech that her husband had embraced her family, and that even though he is “a meat and potatoes kind of guy, he adapted to my vegetarian diet and learned to cook food for my mother, Indian food.” The Vances are parents to three young children—Ewan, Vivek and Mirabel.
Until recently Ms Vance has maintained a lower public profile than her husband, but she appears to have moved to the right alongside him. Ms Vance, now a Republican, was registered as a Democrat a decade ago. After Yale, Ms Vance clerked for John Roberts, America’s chief justice. She earlier had clerked for another now-justice, Brett Kavanaugh, when he was an appeals-court judge. She also worked as a lawyer at a distinguished firm. But Ms Vance left her position shortly after her husband was announced as Mr Trump’s vice-presidential pick.
Ms Vance has appeared as a somewhat reluctant political spouse at times. She told Fox News that she was “not raring to change anything about our lives right now. But I really, you know, believe in J.D., and I really love him. And so we’ll just sort of see what happens with our lives.”
As a politician Mr Vance has embraced a more pugnacious and populist vein of conservatism than the sort he had when he first came to national attention in 2016. The youngest vice-presidential pick in decades also has grown some facial hair in recent years. But his wife insists that he is still very much the same man that she had met at Yale long ago. Like her husband, Ms Vance seems willing to adapt to meet the demands of their shared ambitions. ■
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