Who is Vice President-elect JD Vance's wife, Usha Vance?
Vice President-elect JD Vance is a Yale-educated lawyer, politician, author and venture capitalist.
On July 15, 2024 at the Republican National Convention, President-elect Donald Trump announced that he had selected JD Vance, formerly a staunch critic of his and currently the junior United States senator from Ohio, as his running mate, NBC News reported.
The 40-year-old politician rose to fame for his 2016 memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy.” The book was adapted into a 2020 Netflix drama and featured the young politician’s blossoming relationship with his future wife Usha Chilukuri Vance, played by actor Freida Pinto in the film.
JD and Usha Vance married in 2014 and today have three children.
Read on for what we know about the wife of Trump’s running mate.
Born to immigrants, Usha Vance was raised in San Diego
Usha Vance, 38, has shared that she was born to parents who immigrated from India, including in her speech at this year's Republican National Convention, per NBC News.
She was raised in a suburb of San Diego, California, she said in her speech.
“My background is very different from JD’s. I grew up in San Diego, in a middle-class community, with two loving parents, both immigrants from India, and a wonderful sister,” she said, per NBC News. “That JD and I could meet at all, let alone fall in love and marry, is a testament to this great country.”
She is a practicing Hindu, like her parents
Usha Vance’s parents practice Hinduism, she said in a June 2024 interview with Fox News.
Her father is Krish Chilukuri, a mechanical engineer and lecturer at San Diego State University, and her mother is Lakshmi Chilukuri, a marine molecular biologist and biochemist who is also a provost at the University of California, San Diego.
In the interview with Fox News, Usha Vance spoke about supporting JD Vance when he decided to convert to Catholicism. He was baptized for the first time in 2019, per an interview the couple did with the New York Times.
When asked why she was supportive of her husband’s choice, Usha Vance spoke about her own religious upbringing on Fox News.
“I did grow up in a religious household,” Usha Vance told Fox News. “My parents are Hindu, and that was one of the things that made them such good parents, that make them really very good people. I think I’ve seen the power of that in my own life.”
When it comes to raising their children with two religious, Usha Vance said, “There are a lot of things we just agree on, especially when it comes to family life and how to raise our kids. The answer is, we just talk a lot.”
JD and Usha Vance met in law school
In a 2017 interview with NBC News, Usha Vance reflected on having met JD Vance while the two were students at Yale Law School. The two had “all their classes together,” she said.
“We were friends, and I liked that he was very diligent,” she said. “He would show up at 9 a.m. appointments that I would set up for us to start working on the brief together.”
During the interview, JD Vance described his wife as quick to be protective.
“The thing that I remember most about Usha is just how completely forward and comfortable with herself she was,” JD Vance recalled of his wife during their time as law students. “(She was) so defensive about the things that she really cared about.”
“You know, our dog got in trouble at daycare,” he remembered. “This is our dog at daycare, and Usha’s response was, ‘He’s too good for that daycare.’”
Their wedding took place in 2014
According to The New York Times, the two married were married in Kentucky in 2014, where guests sat on wooden benches set in the grass. They were also blessed by a Hindu pundit in a separate ceremony, The New York Times reported.
Today, they have 3 children
The couple has three young children: Sons Ewan and Vivek, and a daughter named Mirabel.
At the time of their 2017 interview with NBC News, the couple was expecting their first child. Usha Vance described her husband as “gentle” and “kind.”
“He’s actually a very gentle person,” she said at the time. “I think that comes across in the way he tells a story. We have two dogs and the way that he treats them — they’re like his babies, and so I’ve seen him kind of with vulnerable creatures for many years now.”
She was previously employed as a lawyer
Usha Vance earned a bachelor’s degree from Yale University and then attended Cambridge University for a master’s degree before returning to the U.S. to attend law school at Yale.
Her LinkedIn page shows she worked as an associate attorney at Munger, Tolles & Olson LLP for almost six years.
Following the announcement of JD Vance as the vice presidential pick, Usha Vance resigned from her job.
“Usha has informed us she has decided to leave the firm. 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,” communications manager Sara Rosenblit said in an email to TODAY.com.
Her bio on her former firm’s website, which has since been taken down, described her as a litigator for its San Francisco and Washington, D.C. offices, whose practice focuses on “complex civil litigation and appeals” in sectors including “higher education, local government, entertainment, and technology.”
Her law firm’s website says she clerked for Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr. of the U.S. Supreme Court, and she also clerked for Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh when he was an appeals court judge in Washington, D.C.
She’s a bookworm
In an Oct. 22 profile, NBC News noted Usha Vance was reading the edition of “The Iliad” translated by University of Pennsylvania classicist Emily Wilson during the campaign.
“That’s because our now 7-year-old decided in the spring that he was obsessed with mythology,” she told NBC News. “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.”
The story highlighted her campaign trail reading list, which included “North Woods” by Daniel Mason and “In the Woods” by Tana French.
According to a 2022 New York Times profile, Usha Vance marked 65 books as “read” between the years of 2007 to 2010. The books included works by Zadie Smith, Jonathan Safran Foer and Vladimir Nabokov, the publication noted.
This article was originally published on TODAY.com