What Is Usha Vance Thinking?

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In the fall of 2018, during the convulsive, unformed days after Christine Blasey Ford went public to accuse Brett Kavanaugh of sexual assault, one report in particular rankled Usha Vance.

She had clerked for then-Judge Kavanaugh only three years earlier, a role that was often a stepping stone to a clerkship on the Supreme Court, as it was for Usha. When Donald Trump nominated Kavanaugh for a promotion to the high court that summer, Republicans presented him as a champion of women, the better to blunt his expected impact. A laudatory letter from 18 of Kavanaugh’s female clerks was submitted to the Senate in July. Usha was by then working for Chief Justice Roberts and barred from this type of political comment. But her husband, J.D., and his mentor and Yale law professor Amy Chua each contributed enthusiastic Wall Street Journal op-eds to the cause. Chua wrote that she’d successfully recommended eight Yale Law women to clerkships with Kavanaugh; her own daughter would soon join their ranks. J.D., made famous by the enormous success of his memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, and at the time playing the role of principled critic of Donald Trump, praised another Yale Law grad, Kavanaugh, as an inspiration and fellow outnumbered conservative — as well as someone who had given his wife a job.

It was on September 16 that Blasey Ford alleged to the Washington Post that Kavanaugh had drunkenly assaulted her when the two were in high school. The same week, The Guardian reported that Chua had told her female students a year earlier that it was “not an accident” that the female clerks Kavanaugh selected “looked like models.” (Chua denied the story but years later conceded to Slate, “I did stupidly comment that then-Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s clerks one year were nice looking — a comment I regret and would never say today.”) By then, Usha was done at the Supreme Court and free to speak her mind. She chose to do so to a private listserv of her former law-school classmates.

In an email dated September 22, 2018, Usha wrote: “As someone who clerked for Judge Kavanaugh and therefore participated in the hiring process, I know firsthand that the rumors attributed to Professor Chua misrepresent his approach to hiring and his treatment of female applicants.” She added, “I hope that none of you, in commenting on the need for candor in the hiring process or voicing your views on Judge Kavanaugh’s nomination, will choose to demean the women who clerked for him by endorsing the narrative that our appearance won us our jobs.”

In the week since Blasey Ford’s accusation, some of Kavanaugh’s former clerks had raced to declare their former boss incapable of assault. But Usha’s remarks, for years, were apparently limited to this: a private and very narrow admonition, commenting only on a rumor that had direct bearing on her own professional accomplishments. Years later, when she did speak publicly, it was to express her sympathy for Kavanaugh and his wife as public figures under pressure.

Usha’s professional and personal trajectory has been marked by similarly careful discretion and self-interest. As her husband’s arc in public life has been distinguished by his willingness to say absolutely anything, at great length and often eloquently, to get ahead, Usha has seemed to intentionally say as little as she can get away with. She has largely kept her own beliefs — political and otherwise — inscrutable even to those close to her. She declined to be interviewed for this story, but my conversations with her friends and associates from college, law school, and judicial clerkships were remarkably uniform. I was told that Usha was well liked, academically and professionally impressive, and that her inner life was a black box. “She didn’t seem to have strong emotions,” a law-school classmate and former friend said. “It didn’t seem like things got to her that much, and she was never very vulnerable.” The classmate added, sincerely, “I kind of wonder if she’s a sociopath.”

Many people who knew Usha in the years before J.D. went MAGA wonder how this nonwhite daughter of immigrants, a former registered Democrat and successful beneficiary of some of the most elite institutions in the world, could stomach the realities of the Trump-Vance ticket. There is at least some evidence that Usha is holding her nose as she participates, or at least that she would like people to believe she is: In July, an unnamed friend told the Washington Post that Usha had found the January 6 attack “deeply disturbing” and was “generally appalled by Trump.” J.D. was always a conservative, but his turn to election-denying, immigrant-libeling, childless-woman-hating did not begin until his first declared run for office in 2021. “Initially, I thought, Surely she can’t be okay with this, and she’s going to divorce him in time,” said the ex-friend. “Then I saw her at the Republican National Convention and thought, Could she actually be onboard?”

A strategist for Vance’s Senate campaign and a longtime family friend, Jai Chabria, speaking on behalf of the Vances, said in late October that Usha, like her husband, has undergone a “shift in views.” But as a friend of the couple put it, her beliefs may matter less than her actions: “When people say leave Usha out of it — well, she’s in.”

With J.D. Vance at the RNC.
Photo: Doug Mills/Redux

Usha Chilukuri, the daughter of academic scientists who emigrated about a year before her birth, grew up in a San Diego suburb. This year, in her few public remarks, Usha has told their story in a way that effectively minimizes friction with her new position on the Republican ticket. In August, in an interview with Fox News in the Vances’ beige-on-beige living room in Cincinnati, Usha told Ainsley Earhardt that her parents arrived legally, from “a different country,” avoiding naming India at all. What’s more, Usha stressed, her family and their friends had assimilated. “Everyone came with this kind of intention of belonging and worked really hard to do it,” she said. “And I think that that’s just a critical part of how our country was built and how everyone just becomes an American at the end of the day.”

Usha has also taken pains to make clear that she is the good kind of non-Christian. In another joint Fox News interview, from June, when J.D. was still auditioning to be Trump’s running mate, the couple was asked about faith. J.D. spoke, hurriedly, about getting baptized, then said, “It’s funny, Usha was not raised Christian, is actually not Christian.” “Oh, really?” said the interviewer, Lawrence B. Jones, his eyebrows shooting up. Usha had been very supportive when he started to “reengage” with his faith, J.D. said. “I did grow up in a religious household,” Usha added. “My parents are Hindu, and that was one of the things that made them such good parents, that make them really very good people.”

Usha excelled at Mount Carmel High School, a public school, where she played the flute and had a tight-knit circle of friends. She headed to Yale for college in 2003. As a junior, Usha was named one of the 50 Most Beautiful Students in a campus tabloid, the Rumpus — her photo labeled with the portmanteau “Taj ma’hottie.” The adjoining story said she was single and interested in “a man who has a lot to say for himself.” “In the past,” it read, “most of her liaisons have been tall, handsome, and conservative (though she herself is of the leftish persuasion.)” According to friends, she did have at least one Republican boyfriend — whom she was dating when she started law school—but the article’s author seems to have been overstating Usha’s “leftish” bent. “She was not overtly political,” a former college classmate told me. “Which at Yale could just mean someone is carefully getting ready for things.”

From the outside, the thing she seemed to be getting ready for was conventional high achievement: first two prestigious fellowships — in China and at the University of Cambridge — followed by admission to the top law school in the country. Back at Yale for law school, she scored a top position on the Yale Law Journal, and she selected clinics — where students gain practical experience — with a public-interest bent, including the Media Freedom and Information Access Clinic and one for Iraqi refugee assistance.

Usha and J.D. met in their very first days at Yale Law. The two were assigned to the same “small group,” a cohort that takes all their classes together in their first semester. In Hillbilly Elegy, J.D. describes quickly falling for Usha because she was “a combination of every positive quality a human being should have: bright, hardworking, tall, and beautiful.” J.D. described loving her directness and sense of humor. A classmate who was friendly with them both, Christopher Lapinig, now an attorney in Los Angeles, recalled it somewhat differently. “I distinctly remember him saying that one of the biggest things, maybe the biggest thing, that drew him to her was her ambition,” he told me. “It said something that J.D., in this school of generally ambitious, high-achieving people, found Usha to be especially ambitious above and beyond the average YLS student.”

What drew Usha to J.D. besides the fact that he apparently fit her usual type of tall and conservative? In 2017, in a joint interview for Megyn Kelly’s now-defunct NBC show, Usha said she liked that the former Marine was “diligent” and would show up on time for the 9 a.m. study appointments she made for them.

Lapinig recalled that J.D. wore his conservatism on his sleeve in those days but kept it civil, making friends with people he disagreed with. “I’m queer, I’m from New York, and I’ve long identified as a progressive,” Lapinig told me, and still the two were relatively close. J.D. even showed up to a critical-race-theory reading group Lapinig organized.

Lapinig was also friends with Usha and used to spend time at her shared apartment, hanging out with her large German shepherd, Casper. But their friendship fractured in their final semester, when a Yale Law Journal committee met to elect the publication’s officers for the next year. A majority of the voting members chose an all-white, all-male group. Lapinig, who had created a position for himself on the journal focused on diversity and inclusion, stormed out in protest. Usha, he says, voted for the slate he had vocally condemned. Her behavior afterward left him uneasy. “Whereas everyone else knew not to engage,” he said, “Usha nevertheless pretended like nothing had happened between us — that she had not supported something that so deeply offended me — and very intentionally tried to keep interacting with me.” (This year, he plans to dress as her for Halloween; his boyfriend will be J.D.)

Usha and J.D. made a memorable pair. The legal writer David Lat remembers attending a poker night with the couple in 2011 at the neo-Gothic home of Chua and her husband, fellow Yale law professor Jed Rubenfeld, who years later would be suspended from the law school for sexual harassment. At the time, Chua was mainly known for her book Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, a gaily provocative paean to achievement-oriented parenting. Chua was a kind of den mother to certain student protégés, known on campus as “Chua pets,” and J.D. was central among them. According to another former friend of the pair, Chua was not a fan of Usha. “Probably because she didn’t engage in her bullshit,” the former friend said. “You have to gossip and drink. J.D. loved that shit.” Usha did not.

Lat happened to ride the Metro-North up from New York for the poker game with the soon-to-be Vances. He told his husband later that night that they’d reminded him of another famous Yale Law couple, Bill and Hillary Clinton. “They had a kind of energy to them,” Lat said. “They seemed very confident and successful. One thing that struck me as Hillary-esque was that Usha seemed to have more polish than J.D.” According to J.D., in Hillbilly Elegy, Chua told Vance he should focus on his relationship rather than chasing clerkships like many of his peers. (Chua declined to talk to me for this story and said that she was generally refraining from commenting on either Vance.)

J.D. seemed to take Chua’s advice. Sofia Nelson, who ended a close friendship with J.D. when he publicly declared his support for an Arkansas ban on trans health care for minors, says that near the end of law school, J.D. told her that he was open to being a stay-at-home dad. Usha and J.D. got engaged near the end of their final year at YLS. It was important to J.D. that their family, unlike the one of his childhood, all share the same name, and Hamel, his surname at the time, came from a stepfather who was only in his life briefly. J.D. told at least two friends that he was open to taking Usha’s last name, Chilukuri. In the end, the two chose Vance, the name of the maternal grandparents who largely raised him.

At first, Usha and J.D.’s post-law-school careers seemed to move in tandem. After graduation in 2013, they moved to Kentucky to clerk for a pair of federal district court judges, who would a year later tag-team officiate the Vance wedding. A second Hindu ceremony was held the same weekend.

Two years later, J.D. and Usha moved to San Francisco. Usha went into corporate law as an associate at Munger Tolles & Olsen, a firm that lately has been described in the press as “radically progressive.” (This reputation has less to do with the types of cases the firm takes on and more to do with workplace culture, including family-friendly policies.) J.D., who’d begun seeking the mentorship of Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel back in law school, landed a series of venture-capital gigs.

Hillbilly Elegy was published a year after the Vances arrived in California. According to former friends and acquaintances, the book’s overwhelming success put J.D.’s career in the front seat. The memoir — of a difficult midwestern and Appalachian childhood, sprinkled with punditry about white working-class culture — was fortuitously timed, appearing in late June 2016, roughly four months before the presidential election, and it was received as a skeleton key to understanding Trump voters, even as Vance robustly criticized Trump and broadcast that he’d voted for the independent Evan McMullin. Usha, J.D. told a friend at the time, voted for Hillary Clinton.  

Throughout Hillbilly Elegy — and even more so in the 2020 movie adaptation, in which Usha is played by Freida Pinto — Usha appears as a gracious “spirit guide” (J.D.’s words) to the elite, telling J.D. which forks to use at a law-firm recruitment dinner, calming his road rage, healing his childhood trauma. The same year the film was released, in an interview with Megyn Kelly, J.D. said, “I’m one of those guys who really benefits from having like a sort of a powerful female voice in his left shoulder saying, ‘Don’t do that, do do that.’” Once that voice had been his “mamaw,” his tough-talking but loving grandmother (played by Glenn Close in the movie) who died in 2005. “Now, it’s Usha,” he said. He graciously called his wife “way more accomplished than I am.” Some of Usha’s friends who knew her before she began dating J.D. believed her influence went further than that: They thought J.D. would have been nowhere without Usha. A former law-school friend of J.D. told me that when Usha was working at a demanding law-firm job, she kept her husband’s schedule and interviewed candidates when he was looking for a personal assistant.

By all accounts, Usha was fiercely loyal to J.D. “Usha is so defensive about the things that she really cares about,” J.D. told Kelly in 2017. He was still baby-faced and a little awkward then, and Usha was 37 weeks pregnant with their first child. “Our dog got in trouble at day care. This is our dog at day care. And Usha’s response was, ‘He’s too good for that day care anyway.’” Beside him, Usha shrugged, smiling a little. “He is!” she said.

With Brett Kavanaugh during her 2014–15 clerkship.
Photo: Department of Justice/AP Photo

That particular Kelly interview caught the Vances at a pivotal moment. Around that time, Mitch McConnell, still Senate majority leader, called J.D., still a sought-after pundit, and asked if he would consider running for Senate in Ohio, his home state, against longtime and popular incumbent Sherrod Brown. There were a few complications to consider. For one, J.D., who was 32 at the time, hadn’t lived in Ohio since graduating from college at Ohio State. Usha had also accepted a yearlong clerkship for John Roberts, chief justice of the United States. (A friend recalled her interviewing for multiple clerkships, including for Sonia Sotomayor and Clarence Thomas.) The gig would begin in the summer of 2017, only seven weeks after she was due to give birth. Nonetheless, it was decided that J.D. would move to Ohio; Usha would go to D.C. J.D. announced his return to the state with a series of interviews and an op-ed in the New York Times. His claimed purpose was to start a nonprofit to battle the opioid crisis, which had fractured his family, and to bring prosperity to the state. Casper the German shepherd and their second dog, Pippin, would go with J.D.

Usha began her clerkship with Roberts right on time, seven weeks after giving birth. A fellow Supreme Court clerk who began at the same time remembers feeling somewhat awestruck by her perfect dress and coiffed hair. “I remember meeting her that first day and thinking, You are so put together,” the former clerk told me. “Like, How did you do that? I was not functional when my children were born.”

Years later, J.D. would discuss this period on a podcast hosted by Eric Weinstein, managing director of Thiel Capital. J.D. explained that his mother-in-law had taken a sabbatical the year that Usha was clerking on the Supreme Court to help care for their newborn. Weinstein happily declared the move “this weird, unadvertised feature of marrying an Indian woman,” which he had also done. (At one point, as J.D. enthused about what devoted grandparents Usha’s parents were to their son, Weinstein cut in: “That’s the whole purpose of the postmenopausal female, in theory.” J.D. can be heard saying, “Yes,” halfway through the sentence.)

J.D. replied saying that this family arrangement — going ahead with both the clerkship and baby at once — was “in some ways the most transgressive thing I’ve ever done against sort of the hyper-neoliberal approach to work and family.” Yet the setup seemed to prioritize the serious professional ambitions of two working parents. Later in the podcast, J.D. revealed the limits of this supposed rebellion, remarking, “My wife is a working mother. We have somebody who helps us take care of our kids.”

With her kids on Capitol Hill in January.
Photo: T.J. Kirkpatrick/Redux

The pair spent about a year technically living apart — the first year of his son’s life — though clerks at the Supreme Court remember seeing J.D. at happy hours and brunch. In a hacked and leaked opposition dossier about Vance, prepared for the 2024 Trump campaign, the fact of this dual-state residency is referred to as one of his “Notable Vulnerabilities With Moderates.”

Usha clerked during what would be a consequential term, the first real test of the Court’s willingness to hold the Trump administration accountable. Roberts, Usha’s boss, authored the majority opinion in Hawaii v. Trump, upholding what was best known as the Muslim ban. According to two other clerks, Usha did not work on that opinion. One of the cases she was assigned to involved whether the Trump administration could force a minor in immigration detention to stay pregnant against her will, a case Kavanaugh had ruled on in the lower court, when it was truly consequential. He’d sought to prevent her abortion by running out the clock. By the time the case got to the Supreme Court, the minor had managed to get an abortion, and the justices put forth an unsigned opinion with no dissents, declining to sanction the minor’s attorney. 

Back in Ohio, J.D.’s potential Senate run wasn’t shaping up as hoped. At the beginning of 2018, assorted unnamed Republicans leaked to the Columbus Dispatch that they were worried not only about J.D.’s opposition to Trump but also about the validity of his residency in their state. The paper reported that as recently as September 2017, Vance had claimed a tax deduction on the couple’s D.C. property that could only be taken on a primary residence. J.D. told The Atlantic he was abandoning the idea of running, which he attributed to being “an objectively bad call for my family.” In June 2018, near the end of Usha’s clerkship, the Vances moved to Cincinnati, buying a five-bedroom 19th-century Gothic-revival mansion in a walkable neighborhood for $1.4 million. They went door-to-door to introduce themselves to their neighbors, and in December sent them Christmas cards. Following her Roberts clerkship, Usha had taken six months off to be with baby Ewan, but she was working for her old law firm again in a remote position. Over the next two years, she gave birth to two more children, Vivek and Mirabel.

In 2019, J.D. converted to Catholicism, and he soon became a Trumpist; his growing political ambitions now required retrofitting his personal narrative. In September 2021, J.D. told alt-right podcaster Jack Murphy that he was rejecting the values of the elite world he had gained access to, in which he believed he “would be judged not on whether I was a good, you know, husband to this girl that I’d recently fell in love with, not on whether I was a good father to the children that we ultimately would bring into the world. I would be judged on, did I get a Supreme Court clerkship, did I work at a fancy bank or consulting or law firm.” Usha had of course done both of these things. “I just realized to myself,” he said, “this is an incredibly hollow and even gross way to think about character and virtue.” Did Usha feel the same way? Her husband did not say, but he did go on to discuss how elites refused to talk about “the difference between men and women and how we need to inculcate masculine virtues and feminine virtues, but Christianity really does.”

Usha’s former friends and acquaintances said that they really did not know what Usha thought of such views — though the entirety of her professional life would seem to point to a woman who disagreed.

Beginning in the fall of 2020, J.D. sharpened his rhetoric on reproduction. This was when he started talking about childless cat ladies and what he often referred to as the “sociopathic” or “icky” decision of professional women to decline to have children or to wait too long to try. “I’ve seen this with a lot of people in my friend circle, my wife’s friends, and so forth,” J.D. told Eric Weinstein. In September 2021, he said women who believed “the liberationist path is to spend 90 hours a week working in a cubicle at McKinsey instead of starting a family and having children” were “on a path to misery,” which struck a law-school friend as rather cruelly — and inaccurately — describing real people J.D. knew. By then, he was officially a candidate for the U.S. Senate in Ohio, this time against Tim Ryan.

On the campaign trail, J.D. began referring to his children as belonging to Usha. “My wife has three little kids” he told a conservative radio host in Ohio after Roe v. Wade was overturned in 2022, as if they were born through parthenogenesis. “She’s got three kids,” he said this October to the New York Times’ Lulu Garcia-Navarro. Now, when J.D. is asked to talk about paid family leave or what it is about American culture he believes is hostile to childbearing, as he was at the vice-presidential debate, he often describes Usha as a “working mother” without implying that he himself has anything to juggle. He has come a long way from the would-be stay-at-home dad who put his wife’s career first.

At the RNC.
Photo: Doug Mills/Redux

J.D. gained plenty in bending the knee to the man he had once privately called “America’s Hitler”: first Trump’s endorsement for the Senate race, which revived Vance’s moribund political hopes and got him elected to the Senate, and then, less than two years later, his party’s nomination for vice-president.

For Usha, her husband’s rise in politics meant resigning from her law firm, though by some accounts, her career there had already stalled. David Lat, an experienced chronicler of the legal elite, noticed that when Usha left the firm, she was not yet a partner. “You would expect somebody with that résumé and that many years out to be a partner,” he said. “I wondered whether she had already made sacrifices in her career.” The couple’s decision to advance J.D.’s ambitions by moving to Cincinnati, where Munger doesn’t have offices, he noted, might have slowed her down, or possibly she had prioritized her three children.

J.D.’s decision to join the Republican ticket has brought much grimmer consequences. It didn’t take long for the overtly racist among Trump’s fans to target Usha. “This guy has a nonwhite wife and a kid named Vivek,” complained the white supremacist Nick Fuentes — who had dined with Trump at Mar-a-Lago in 2022 — soon after the pick. (Fuentes is also a Holocaust denier who helped foment the January 6 riots.) “This guy is going to be a defender of white identity? I don’t think so. This guy’s going to defend American identity? … How else could you countenance American identity if you have a mixed-up family like that?”

J.D.’s response to racist remarks on Usha has been to say with macho flourish that his wife is “out of their league.” On ABC News in August, he said, “I mean, Donald Trump’s spent a lot of quality time with my wife. Every time he sees her, he gives her a hug, tells us she’s beautiful, and jokes around with her a little bit.” He added, “I wish people would keep it focused on me, but whatever. They’re going to say what they’re going to say. My wife’s tough enough to handle it, and that’s a good thing.”

If any of these ugly attacks have bothered Usha, she hasn’t let on. In August, she told Fox News’ Earhardt, “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.” The same went, she said, for criticism from former friends. Though, she added, “It is hard to know that sometimes politics comes in the way of friendships. It is hurtful and it is sad.”

When Earhardt asked her how she’d felt watching the Kavanaugh hearings, Usha at last commented on her former boss publicly. At the time, she said, she wasn’t thinking about what it might be like to go through it. “Now I look back and I think about Mrs. Kavanaugh,” she said. “The way she carried herself was incredible. It showed a lot of strength. And it’s a model for the way to proceed.” I covered those hearings. I remember the raw, whispery emotion of Blasey Ford, the rare sight of Republicans tiptoeing around her, and of course the moment Kavanaugh unbuckled his rage. When she wasn’t invisible, Mrs. Kavanaugh was mainly quiet and faithful. In claiming her, Usha was embracing the role of a silent wife, standing by her man.

Still, in July at the RNC, Usha conspicuously avoided speaking Trump’s name in her speech. The Times reported that Usha and J.D. had worked on their speeches together, but in an interview with Fox News a few weeks after the convention, Usha made a point of saying that she didn’t show her speech to J.D. beforehand — that her words were her own. For those really squinting, looking for finer evidence of defiance, it was notable that Usha had not remade herself in Trump’s image of femininity: She hadn’t dyed her hair to cover grays; on the first night of the RNC, she wore a beige shift dress and flat mary janes.

In late August, Dan Driscoll, a friend of the Vances and current adviser to the Trump-Vance campaign told the Daily Beast that Usha didn’t want to be on the campaign trail. But within weeks, as J.D.’s unfavorables rose amid allegations of weirdness, there were Usha and the kids, and even their large dog Atlas, deplaning Trump Force Two, sipping chocolate milk in diners, and making small talk at butcher shops. “The thing that J.D. asked, and the thing that I certainly agreed to do,” Usha told NBC News in October, “is to keep him company.”

One of the couple’s former Yale Law classmates mused that perhaps, “for a certain type of strive-y, former gifted kid, you can sort of disassociate from the substance of it and say, ‘I’m going to support my spouse.’” He could imagine, he said, that to Usha, being the Second Lady — maybe someday the first — might be “the next shiny star.”