Usha Vance, wife of Republican vice presidential contender JD Vance, has been a supporting spouse on the campaign trail. However, the lawyer has faced tremendous scrutiny: her professional history has been analyzed, her image has been compared to that of other women in Donald Trump’s orbit, and, most importantly, her politics have been widely speculated about. Usha Vance, who comes from an educated background, has had an incredibly successful legal career. She attended Yale Law School, clerked for Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh while he was an appeals court judge, and later clerked for Chief Justice John Roberts. She went on to work as a trial lawyer at Munger, Tolles & Olson but left when her husband was named Trump’s running mate.
She met her future husband at Yale after growing up in a middle-class neighborhood in San Diego as the child of Indian immigrants. The pair got married in 2014 and has three children. JD Vance has talked favorably of his wife. In a 2020 interview with Megyn Kelly’s podcast, he stated, “I’m one of those guys who benefits from having sort of a powerful female voice over his left shoulder saying, ‘Don’t do that; do that.'” He went on to say that she has become his guiding figure.
Her husband’s extremist beliefs are well known, but Usha Vance’s politics remain a mystery. According to reports, she has historically leaned liberal or moderate. According to The New York Times, she registered as a Democrat as recently as 2014. The Washington Post reported in July that several of her friends and allies were in “disbelief” as she appeared at the Republican National Convention, where her husband was officially nominated as Trump’s running mate.
Usha Vance has followed her husband on the campaign trail but has resisted establishing a public presence. She has only given one media interview since her husband’s nomination, to Fox News, where she defended her husband’s derogatory remarks about “childless cat ladies” as a “quip.” She has faced racist insults from the right, including from white nationalist Nick Fuentes, who has socialized with Trump. Nonetheless, she has made no public indication that she opposes her husband’s political transition from conservative Never Trumper to torchbearer of the next generation of the MAGA movement. Usha Vance told Fox News in August that she and her husband sometimes disagree on politics, but she believes in his “intention.”
“We’re two different people — we have many different backgrounds and interests and things like that,” she told me. “So we always come to different conclusions. But it is part of the fun of marriage. And what I never doubt about JD, even when we differ on this or that, is his aim, what he truly wants to do.”
