Usha Vance, the wife of Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance, has played the role of supportive spouse on the campaign trail. Yet the lawyer has been subject to intense scrutiny: Her professional career has been dissected, her image has been contrasted with those of other women in Donald Trump’s orbit, and, most of all, her politics have been widely speculated upon.
Usha Vance, who comes from a family of academics, has had a wildly successful career in law. She studied at the prestigious Yale Law School, clerked for Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh when he was an appeals court judge and then was a clerk to Chief Justice John Roberts. She went on to work as a trial lawyer at Munger, Tolles & Olson, a position she left when her husband became Trump’s running mate.
A child of Indian immigrants who grew up in a middle-class neighborhood in San Diego, she met her future husband at Yale.
A child of Indian immigrants who grew up in a middle-class neighborhood in San Diego, she met her future husband at Yale. The couple married in 2014 and have three children.
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JD Vance has spoken highly of his wife. In a 2020 interview on Megyn Kelly’s podcast, he said, “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.’” He added that she now serves as that guiding figure for him.
Her husband’s extreme views have become well known, but Usha Vance’s politics have largely remained a question mark. Reporting has indicated that she has historically leaned liberal or centrist. According to The New York Times, she was a registered Democrat as recently as 2014. In July, The Washington Post reported that some of her friends and associates watched in “disbelief” as she spoke at the Republican National Convention, where her husband was officially nominated as Trump’s running mate.
Usha Vance has accompanied her husband on the campaign trail, but she has largely avoided carving out a public persona of her own. She has sat down for only one media interview — with Fox News — since her husband’s nomination, during which she found herself defending her husband’s denigrating comments about “childless cat ladies” as just a “quip.”
Her husband’s extreme views have become well known, but Usha Vance’s politics have largely remained a question mark.
She has been the target of racist attacks from the right — including from white nationalist Nick Fuentes, who has socialized with Trump. Yet she has given no public indication that she does not support her husband’s political shift from conservative Never Trumper to the torchbearer of the next generation of the MAGA movement.
In her interview with Fox News in August, Usha Vance said she and her husband disagree on politics sometimes, but that she has faith in his “intention.”
“We’re two different people — we have lots of different backgrounds and interests and things like that,” she said. “So we come to different conclusions all the time. But that’s part of the fun of being married. And what I never doubt about JD, even when I disagree about this or that, is his intention, what it is that he really wants to do.”
