The Untold Truth Of JD Vance's Wife Usha

Usha Vance will follow in the recent footsteps of Karen Pence, Jill Biden, and Lynne Cheney in January 2025 when she’s sworn in as second lady, the informal status given to any wife of a male United States vice president. The Californian, who will be the first of Indian American heritage to hold the position, as well as the first Hindu, was a virtual unknown outside legal circles 12 months ago. But thanks to the remarkable rise of her husband JD Vance from Appalachian teen to ‘weird’ politician, she is fast becoming a household name.

So, what do we know about the woman lucky enough to be married to the man who appears to have trouble ordering donuts, makes awkward jokes about Mountain Dew, and allegedly once had intimate relations with a couch? From academic beginnings and political persuasions to career achievements and parental duties, here’s a look at Usha’s untold truth.

Usha Vance has a history degree from Yale, a Master of Philosophy from Cambridge’s Clare College, and a Juris Doctor from Yale Law School. When you learn of her family history, it’s little surprise that the future Second Lady has such an impressive academic background.

Usha’s mother works at the University of California as a provost and molecular biologist; her father is a mechanical engineer and San Diego State University lecturer; and her paternal grandfather was a physics teacher at IIT Madras who made such an impact on the institution that they named a student award in his honor. Her younger sister, meanwhile, has her own San Diego semiconductor company.

And Usha’s great aunt has gone in the record books as the oldest professor still working today in India. Chilukuri Santhamma is 96, but somehow still finds the energy to travel 40 miles every day to teach physics. “Most of our family is academically strong and education has been a top priority,” she told Reuters from her hometown of Visakhapatnam.

Considering the deeply conservative ideals of her husband JD Vance, it’s surprising to discover that Usha Vance was once a registered Democrat. Indeed, the future Second Lady aligned herself with the party up until 2014, while the Munger, Tolles & Orson firm she worked for was described by The American Lawyer as “woke” and “radically progressive” (via Business Insider).

Usha largely kept her political views to herself as several former Yale Law School classmates told Business Insider: “She was more tight-lipped, at least in my experience, with her political views,” remarked Marvin Lim. “I don’t remember ever having a political conversation with Usha,” Elliot Forhan concurred. “She just didn’t really show her cards with respect to the political stuff.”

According to Federal Election Commission records, Usha’s shift to the right officially occurred in 2021 when she made a donation to Arizona’s conservative Senate candidate Blake Masters, who, like her spouse, had been financially supported by tech entrepreneur Peter Thiel. 

Usha Vance’s professor great aunt once wrote a book on Bhagavad Gita, a sacred ancient Hindu text. So It’s little surprise to learn that the impending Second Lady and the rest of her family are deeply committed to their faith, too.

“I did grow up in a religious household,” Usha told Fox News in an interview alongside her husband JD Vance in 2024. “My parents are Hindu, and I think that was one of the things that made them such good parents, that make them really very good people.” Of course, with her other half having converted to Catholicism in 2019, Usha finds herself attending church every Sunday. Luckily, according to JD, she doesn’t have a problem with their differing religions.

“I don’t think I would have ever done it without her support, because I felt kind of bad about it, right?” the vice-president-elect told The New York Times about his spiritual epiphany. “She was more than OK with it, and that was a big part of the confirmation that this was the right thing for me.”

Usha Vance might now be assuming a supportive role in her husband JD Vance’s remarkable journey to the White House. But she’s more than well-equipped to play the leader, too. In fact, according to an old family friend, she’s been something of a boss lady since kindergarten.

“By age five or six, she had assumed a leadership role,” Vikram Rao told The New York Times in a piece about the future Second Lady. “She decided which board games we were going to play and what the rules were going to be. She was never mean or unkind, but she was the boss.”

It turns out that Usha also possessed a competitive spirit from an early age. While being interviewed by The San Diego-Union Tribune as a high school student for an article about a trivia competition, the former lawyer remarked, “It’s not enough to know the answers, you have to do it fast.”

To say that Usha Vance is a bookworm is something of an understatement. Even the force of an airplane engine’s fans couldn’t stop the former lawyer from reading Anthony Doerr’s “Cloud Cuckoo Land” during some very brief downtime at a Florida runway in 2021. And she’s continued to show off her material of choice whenever she’s joined her husband, JD Vance, on the campaign trail.

Daniel Mason’s “North Woods,” Tana French’s “In the Woods,” and Alf Wight’s “All Creatures Great and Small” are just a few of the novels that Usha has recently been spotted clutching. But as she explained to NBC News, Emily Watson’s translation of Homer’s “The Iliad” has become her ultimate read: “That’s because our now seven-year-old decided in the spring that he was obsessed with mythology. He picked up a child’s version of ‘The Odyssey’ and then ‘The Iliad’ and all these other things and became completely obsessed. So to keep up with him, I decided it was time to pick ‘The Iliad’ up myself.”

Usha also had an active Goodreads account until 2016 where she vouched for the likes of Zadie Smith’s “White Teeth,” Vladimir Nabokov’s “Lolita,” and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich,” and slated Charles Dickens’ “Hard Times,” Rudyard Kipling’s “Kim,” and Michael Chabon’s “Wonder Boys.” Funnily enough, the last book she rated was her husband’s. And unsurprisingly, she awarded “Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis” five stars.

Usha Vance sure didn’t waste any time in quitting her job once husband JD Vance was confirmed as the vice president nominee for the Republican party in 2024. Within minutes of Donald Trump’s announcement, her online bio at Munger, Tolles & Olson had been removed, and soon after, the firm revealed that she’d handed in her notice.

“Usha has been an excellent lawyer and colleague, and we thank her for her years of work and wish her the best in her future career,” a spokesperson said in relation to the corporate litigator’s swift departure. The future Second Lady, who’d worked for the company on various cases involving local government, technology, and higher education for almost six years, later told People that her decision was based on personal reasons.

Indeed, Usha revealed that she’d quit to focus on looking after the couple’s three children, Ewan, Vivek, and Mirabel, while JD prepared for his election campaign. “I am forever grateful for the opportunities I’ve had at Munger and for the excellent colleagues and friends I’ve worked with over the years,” she concluded.

One can imagine that JD Vance’s controversial election campaign, and no doubt everything that follows, could make for a great movie one day. Of course, the vice-president-elect’s life story before his alignment with Donald Trump has already received the Hollywood treatment.

In 2020, Ron Howard adapted JD’s memoir “Hillbilly Elegy” for a Netflix original in which Gabriel Basso played the author and “Slumdog Millionaire” star Freida Pinto his wife Usha Vance. Although Glenn Close received an Oscar nomination for her portrayal of JD’s grandma Mamaw, the general critical response was overwhelmingly brutal.

“Bootstrapping poverty porn” which “reinforces the stereotypes it insists it’s illuminating,” wrote The A.V. Club. “A prestige slog, full of flat, sneering caricatures,” remarked The Guardian.” “The movie’s a neoliberal’s fantasy and a sociopolitical tract defanged,” commented The Boston Globe. According to a friend of the family, such reviews left both of the Vances stung, with The New York Times theorizing that they may also have played a part in Usha’s shift to the right.

Usha and JD Vance certainly have a novel meet cute. They first bonded in 2013 while organizing a Yale Law School discussion group titled “Social Decline in White America.” With the encouragement of their professor, Amy Chua, and the bemusement of their friends, who saw them as polar opposites, the pair continued to develop a relationship. And as he wrote in his memoir “Hillbilly Elegy,” the future vice-president-elect soon became besotted.

“She seemed some sort of genetic anomaly, a combination of every positive quality a human being should have: bright, hardworking, tall, and beautiful,” JD gushed (via The Standard) before joking that Usha would have made a great Ayn Rand heroine if her personality had been terrible. “But she had a great sense of humor and an extraordinarily direct way of speaking,” he added.

JD was also enamored by how Usha helped him navigate the complexities of university life: “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.”

JD Vance looked to have derailed his vice-presidential campaign once again when a 2021 interview was unearthed in which he denigrated a significant section of the voting population: women without kids. Indeed, the “Hillbilly Elegy” author sneeringly dismissed this particular demographic (via Fox News) as “childless cat ladies” who “want to make the country miserable.”

JD inevitably suffered a huge backlash from those he insulted, including Jennifer Aniston and Taylor Swift. But in a chat with “Fox & Friends,” his wife Usha adopted the well-worn excuse that his comments had been completely misinterpreted. “I took a moment to look and actually see what he had said and try to understand what the context was and all that, which is something that I really wish people would do a little bit more often,” Usha said, appearing to shift the blame back to those who’d been insulted.

“And the reality is he made a quip in service of making a point that he wanted to make that was substantive, and it had actual meaning,” Usha continued before insisting that her other half would never intend to upset anyone trying to start a family: “It is challenging and never, ever anything that anyone would want to mock or make fun of, and I also understand there are a lot of other reasons why people may choose not to have families, and many of those reasons are very good,” she added somewhat begrudgingly.

Usha Vance clerked for several high-profile individuals during her law career, including Chief Justice of the United States John Roberts, Judge Amul Thapar of the District Court for the Eastern District of Kentucky, and perhaps most notably, Brett Kavanaugh on the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.

And Usha had nothing but positive things to say about the man who’d later join the Supreme Court in an interview with “Fox & Friends.” The impending Second Lady claimed (via Newsweek) that Kavanaugh was a champion for diversity, having taken on individuals from “all over the political spectrum,” with decency and trust as his most important prerequisites. “Overwhelmingly positive” was how she summarized her overall experience.

Usha was also asked about the various historic sexual assault and sexual misconduct allegations made against Kavanaugh that were later dismissed by the Senate Judiciary Committee. “It was really, really challenging to see not a different side of him but a different way of people engaging with him,” she remarked.

Although she was no doubt glued to the screen on November 5, 2024, Usha Vance largely tries to avoid watching the news. And considering the battering that her husband, JD Vance, often received due to his controversial vice-presidential campaign, that was probably a wise move.

In an interview with “Fox & Friends,” the future Second Lady revealed that she’d taken the ‘ignorance is bliss’ approach on the advice of a friend: “It’s just JD is out there. He’s talking about all sorts of things. He’s thinking all sorts of things and I just think he deserves to have someone in his life who hears it straight from him and doesn’t just hear what other people are saying about him all the time. And so I think that really helps.”

Usha also revealed that even when she does stumble upon some negative publicity, she’s now far better equipped to deal with it: “I think we’ve been doing this now for a little while, and I’ve gotten kind of accustomed to it and grown a bit of a thick skin to it. And so I just try to not let it affect the way that I live.”

What a difference three years make. During the presidential election campaign of 2024, Usha Vance seemed more than happy to share the stage with Donald Trump, the former and future POTUS who’d selected her husband as his running mate. But head back to the start of 2021 and the former lawyer was far from the MAGA advocate’s biggest fan.

“Usha found the incursion on the Capitol and Trump’s role in it to be deeply disturbing,” an anonymous friend told The Washington Post before adding that the one-time lawyer had also been appalled by the politician in general since his rise to the White House in 2016. “It was surreal to see her sitting next to him last night,” they continued, referring to Usha’s appearance at the Republican Convention.

Although another old acquaintance, LA-based marketing director and writer Chad Callaghan, wasn’t surprised by Usha’s rise to power, he was surprised by the circumstances: “To see her there to support a man who seems to be building political power by punching down at trans folks and immigrants? Yeah, that part caught me off guard.”

In July 2024, Usha Vance seemed to quite happily stand beside her husband, JD Vance, at the Republican Convention as he was officially nominated as the running mate for Donald Trump’s presidential election campaign. And yet, just weeks earlier, the former lawyer appeared to admit that she wasn’t exactly keen on entering the political stratosphere.

“I don’t know that anyone is ever ready for that kind of scrutiny,” Usha told “Fox & Friends” (via The Guardian) about the prospect of JD being chosen by the 45th (and now 47th) before revealing that she’d found her previous experiences on the campaign trail tough going: “It was so different from anything we’d ever done before. But it was an adventure.”

Usha then reiterated that she wasn’t quite ready for another such adventure so soon. “And so I guess the way that I put it is, I’m not raring to change anything about our lives right now. But I really, you know, believe in JD, and I really love him. And so we’ll just sort of see what happens with our lives.” Of course, these proved to be famous last words as not only did she publicly support her other half’s new role, but she also gave up her position at the legal firm Munger, Tolles & Olson to help raise their family, too.

Unlike Gwen Walz, Usha Vance largely kept away from the spotlight during her husband’s presidential running mate campaign. The only public speech she made was to introduce JD Vance at the Republican convention. Of course, that doesn’t mean the former lawyer wasn’t working tirelessly elsewhere.

Indeed, Usha was a key figure behind the scenes, particularly when it came to helping JD prepare for any public speaking: an insider told NBC News that she was pivotal in the preparations for his televised debate with Tim Walz (it’s not clear whether the guyliner was her choice). And the Yale Law School graduate told Fox News that her husband values her input.

“I think that he treats everything I say with a lot of seriousness and respect,” Usha remarked (via NBC News). “And that becomes a part of the way that he thinks about things, as is true for me. The way that he talks about things and the conclusions he comes to really shape the way that I think about things, so there’s a nice give and take, but I think it’s a pretty happy one.”