Usha Vance's new life in Trump's Washington

Boston Globe

6 hours ago

Less than a year ago, Usha Vance, onetime Democrat and the daughter of immigrants, was living a radically different life as a litigator for a progressive law firm while raising her children in Ohio. Many old friends are bewildered by her transformation. She may be the wife of the vice president, they say, but she must be appalled by the Trump administration's attacks on academia, law firms, judges, diversity programs and immigrants.
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Others say she likes the respite from her legal career and the glamour and influence of her new role. (Vance, who clerked for Chief Justice John Roberts and was a top editor on The Yale Law Journal, referred to herself at a recent public appearance as a 'former lawyer.') She always supported her husband's ambitions, they note, even if she did not necessarily share them. People close to the vice president, who went from being a vocal critic of now-President Donald Trump to his running mate, argue that Vance went on a similar but less public journey that soured her on the left.
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Either way, colleagues say, she is a model, at least for now, of a movement embraced by the White House and pushed by her husband that encourages women to have more children and celebrate the family as the centerpiece of American life.
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'I think she's doing a great job as second lady of the United States,' Vice President JD Vance said in March in Bay City, Michigan, with Usha Vance standing behind him. 'And here's the thing: Because the cameras are all on, anything that I say, no matter how crazy, Usha has to smile and laugh and celebrate it.'
Vice President Vance kisses his wife, Usha, before taking the floor on the first day of the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, in July 2024.
DOUG MILLS/NYT
Online critics slammed the vice president for sexism. But those who know the couple say that no matter her silence in public, JD Vance leans on his wife's counsel in private.
'Her influence on her husband is incalculable,' said the senior Trump administration official, who has worked with Usha Vance on and off for the past year and asked not to be named in order to speak freely. The official described the second lady as someone who has 'well considered' opinions on marriage, politics and faith, but holds herself at reserve.
If Vance is not happy with all aspects of the Trump White House, friends say she would never let on. 'Her history and her upbringing suggest it,' the administration official said, 'but she's married to JD, and at some point you have to accept it.'
The Vances have babysitters but no live-in nanny, and JD Vance leaves the West Wing many early evenings to have dinner with his family and help put the children to bed. He either returns to the White House afterward or works from his office in the vice president's official residence. The Vances have also taken their three children, now 8, 5 and 3, on official international trips, including to Good Friday services at the Vatican and to dinner in New Delhi with the prime minister of India. Both events generated video and photographs of the children with their parents seen all over the world.
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Vance declined to be interviewed for this article, as did a large number of relatives, friends and colleagues. More than a dozen who did offer their perspectives did so on the condition of anonymity out of fear of angering her.
Only recently has she tiptoed out on her own and offered a glimpse of herself and the purpose she sees in her new role. On June 1, she announced on social platform X the 'Second Lady's 2025 Summer Reading Challenge' for children, driven by her view that reading is an antidote to modern distractions, including her own.
'I'll be honest: I look at my phone far too often,' Vance said at a U.S.-India partnership forum in Washington this month. 'I, as a lawyer, was constantly receiving email, constantly responding, being quick. And being aware of what's going on at any given moment was an advantage. But it changes the way that you think. And so I myself have been challenging myself to read things that are increasingly challenging, increasingly long, sometimes increasingly boring, in an attempt to really bring that part of myself back.'
The reading challenge, she said at the forum, is a 'bite-sized component of a larger project to continue expanding access to literacy.' The goal 'is to roll out little things bit by bit and see which ones work and which ones don't and then try to expand the ones that work. As a former lawyer, I get really bored if I don't have projects.'
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A Cool Salve for a Hot Temper
From the start, back when they first met at Yale Law School, Vance has been her husband's guide to the elite and a cool salve for his hot temper. One friend of the couple said he would not be vice president without her.
'I'm one of those guys who really benefits from having sort of a powerful female voice over his left shoulder saying, 'Don't do that, do that,'' JD Vance told Megyn Kelly in 2020. For a long time it was his grandmother, Mamaw. 'Now it's Usha,' he said.
Vice President Vance and second lady Usha Vance in a private area during the 2024 Republican National Convention.
DOUG MILLS/NYT
Unlike JD Vance, whose roots are in a dysfunctional family of the white underclass captured in his bestselling memoir, 'Hillbilly Elegy,' Usha Vance is the eldest of two daughters of accomplished Indian immigrants, Krish and Lakshmi Chilukuri, both Brahmins from the South Indian state of Andhra Pradesh. They arrived in California in the early 1980s with a wave of English-speaking Indian engineers, doctors and scientists seeking opportunities in the United States.
The Chilukuris settled in Rancho Peñasquitos, a planned San Diego neighborhood of Spanish-mission-style houses, where their home today is worth $1.4 million. Vance's father, Krish, worked as an aerospace engineer at United Technologies and Collins Aerospace for 30 years and is now a lecturer at San Diego State. Lakshmi, Vance's mother, is a molecular biologist and the provost of Sixth College, an undergraduate school at the University of California, San Diego.
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Vance blazed her way through the local Mount Carmel High School, Yale College, a teaching fellowship in China and a prestigious Gates Foundation scholarship at the University of Cambridge in Britain. There she studied the development of copyright law in 17th-century England and wrote in the Gates scholars' yearbook that her interests were 'exploring urban neighborhoods, cooking & green markets, long walks, panicking about law school.'
Whatever worries she may have had, friends describe her as a picture of confidence when she was back at Yale in 2010 to start law school. She and JD Vance were soon assigned as partners on a major writing assignment. He was awestruck.
'She seemed some sort of genetic anomaly, a combination of every positive quality a human being should have: bright, hardworking, tall and beautiful,' he wrote in a widely quoted passage in 'Hillbilly Elegy.'
The feeling was not mutual at first. 'I think it's fair to say that JD was sort of the pedal in the relationship and I was a little bit of the brakes,' she told the crowd at the U.S.-India forum this month. 'Because I was sort of focused on the schooling part of it.'
The two were a couple by their second year of law school, when they went to Washington for interviews with law firms. In an episode in his memoir, JD Vance recounted that he had returned dejected to their hotel room one night after feeling he had done badly with a favorite firm. Usha Vance tried to comfort him, he wrote, but he exploded and stormed out into the streets of downtown Washington. Usha Vance chased after him.
'She calmly told me through her tears that it was never acceptable to run away, that she was worried, and that I had to learn how to talk to her,' JD Vance wrote.
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The two were married in 2014 in an outdoor wedding in Kentucky, near JD Vance's hometown, and spent the next decade crisscrossing the country as their jobs moved them from the East Coast to the West Coast and back to the Midwest. Along the way, Usha Vance gave birth to Ewan in 2017, Vivek in 2020 and Mirabel in 2021.
Vance clerked for Judge Brett Kavanaugh in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit and for Chief Justice Roberts, and worked for the law firm Munger, Tolles & Olson in San Francisco and Washington. JD Vance became a partner in a venture capital fund co-founded by Peter Thiel, a Silicon Valley billionaire and major Trump supporter.
Usha Vance watched her husband participate in a Fox News town hall in Columbus, Ohio, in November 2022, while Vice President Vance was running for US Senate.
MADDIE MCGARVEY/NYT
In 2017, after 'Hillbilly Elegy' had become a critically acclaimed explanation of the Trump working class to the elite, the couple moved to Cincinnati, where Usha Vance worked remotely for Munger. The couple bought a big $1.4 million Victorian in East Walnut Hills, a liberal-leaning neighborhood. Vance joined the board of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra and put Post-it notes on wine bottles to remind her husband which were the good ones to use for guests.
A Pivotal Hearing
A pivotal moment for Usha Vance came in 2018, when Christine Blasey Ford accused Kavanaugh, by then a Supreme Court nominee, of sexually assaulting her at a high school party nearly 40 years earlier. Kavanaugh denied the accusation and was narrowly confirmed, but friends say that Vance was outraged by Democratic attacks on a man she admired.
'My wife worked for Kavanaugh, loved the guy — kind of a dork,' JD Vance told New York Times columnist Ross Douthat last year. 'Never believed these stories.'
That same year, JD Vance went to a dinner of the Business Roundtable, a group of top American chief executives. He sat next to the head of a hotel chain who complained, JD Vance has recounted, that Trump's crackdown at the border had cut off the flow of low-wage immigrants, forcing him to hire American workers at higher prices. A friend said that both Vances were appalled by his complaints.
'One of the really deranged things that I think illegal immigration does to our society is it gets us in a mindset of saying we can only build houses with illegal immigrants, when we have 7 million — just men, not even women, just men — who have completely dropped out of the labor force,' JD Vance told Lulu Garcia-Navarro of the Times in 2024, recalling his encounter with the hotel chain executive. Americans will do those jobs, Vance said, but not for 'below-the-table wages.'
When Vance became Trump's running mate in the summer of 2024, Usha Vance quit her job at Munger and threw herself into the vice presidential campaign. She and the children were often on the trail with him, and colleagues say she was a key part of the preparations for his debate with Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota.
Vice President JD Vance and second lady Usha Vance visit the Taj Mahal with their children in Agra, India, on April 23.
KENNY HOLSTON/NYT
Becoming Second Lady
Usha Vance has largely stayed out of the fray over the administration's political and policy agenda, even as her husband has continued to be a polarizing figure. At one point, he defended a far-right party in Germany, and at another, he successfully called for the reinstatement of an aide to Elon Musk who had quit after the revelation of racist posts he made on X.
The one exception for Usha Vance was in March when she planned a trip to see a national dog sled race in Greenland, which Trump has said he wants to take over from Denmark. Vance made a cheerful video ahead of the trip, but it was ultimately downsized to a brief stop with her husband at a U.S. military base after strong objections from Greenlanders.
In the coming months, Vance says she will continue to roll out second lady projects. For now, she continues to take her children to her office in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, the one with the view of the Washington Monument.
This article originally appeared in
.