Who is Usha Vance, the Indian-origin wife of Trump's Vice Presidential pick JD Vance?
Usha Vance.
The wife of Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, Donald Trump's newly announced running mate, certainly has the credentials. A corporate litigator at a prestigious San Francisco law firm, Usha Vance has clerked for Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh when he was an appeals court judge, and earned degrees from Yale and Cambridge.
It's a conspicuous resume for a woman whose husband gave a speech in 2021 titled «The Universities are the Enemy,» and rarely missed a chance to bash the establishment as he campaigned for the Senate in 2022, as The New York Times previously reported.
But Usha Vance is something of a political cipher.
The daughter of Indian immigrants, Usha Chilukuri grew up in a San Diego suburb. Friends from her childhood and adolescence described her as a «leader» and a «bookworm.» Brainy, ambitious and pragmatic, she moved from an extracurricular-studded four years at Yale to a Gates Fellowship at Cambridge, where she moved in mostly liberal and left-wing circles. As of 2014, she was a registered Democrat.
She and Vance met at Yale Law School, and the pair were married in Kentucky in 2014, and blessed by a Hindu pundit in a separate ceremony.
Usha Vance has played a quiet but significant role in her husband's rise. At Yale, she helped Vance organize his ideas about social decline in rural white America, which formed the basis of his breakout memoir, «Hillbilly Elegy.» (In 2020, the book was adapted into a film directed by Ron Howard.)
And she made rare but
