A Woman in Political Crosshairs: Usha Vance Continues to Receive Scrutiny From Friends, Co-workers, Far Right

As Usha (Chilukuri) Vance sat next to Donald Trump, the GOP nominee for president at the Republican National Convention after her husband J.D. Vance was named the former president’s running mate, her friends said it was “surreal” to see someone outraged by Trump’s incitement of the deadly Jan. 6, 2021 riot at the U.S. Capitol, sharing a booth with him. “Usha found the incursion on the Capitol and Trump’s role in it to be deeply disturbing,” a friend who did not want to share her identity told The Washington Post. “She was generally appalled by Trump, from the moment of his first election.” 

Several friends and colleagues The Post spoke to said they have struggled to reconcile their affection for Usha with the hard-right turn of her husband’s politics. They believe ambition and devotion to her husband ultimately drove her to a place in the former president’s campaign.

Usha’s profile has changed significantly since the convention, held earlier this month in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. She’s been receiving scrutiny from all corners  — about her race, her upbringing, her appearance and her previous liberal-leaning views. Although she’s received some encouragement from many from her party and the Indian American community, the negativity has taken over. Many of her friends and co-workers have been outspoken about their displeasure with how Usha has changed, while the far right has spewed a lot of racist bile against her. 

Usha is the daughter of Indian immigrants and grew up in a San Diego suburb. Her parents, Chilukuri Radhakrishna (Krish) and Lakshmi Chilukuri are originally from Andhra Pradesh and moved to the U.S. in 1980. Krish Chilukuri is an engineer and professor in the Aerospace Engineering department at San Diego State University, while Lakshmi  Chilukuri is a biologist and a provost of Sixth College at UC San Diego.

She attended Mt. Carmel High School. She moved to the East Coast for college and earned a bachelor’s degree in history from Yale University in 2007. Friends from her childhood and adolescence described her as a “leader” and a “bookworm,” The New York Times said in a profile on Usha.

As Time magazine noted in its profile on Usha, she has “largely kept her political views private and has not been very vocal about her positions.” Citing voter records, the Times says she was registered as a Republican in Ohio and “participated in the state’s Republican Senate primary in which her husband was a candidate.” However, according to The New York Times profile, as of 2014, she was a registered Democrat.

Jai Chabria, a Republican strategist for JD Vance’s 2022 Senate campaign and a family friend, told The Post that Usha’s “views of the former president have changed, mirroring the evolution of her husband, once a fierce Trump critic.” Usha has had “a similar shift in views and fully supports Donald Trump and her husband and will do whatever she can to ensure their victory this November,” Chabria said.

“Look, I love my wife so much,” he told Megyn Kelly on her SiriusXM show. “Obviously, she’s not a white person, and we’ve been accused — attacked — by some white supremacists over that,” he continued. “But I just — I love Usha. She’s

Her husband did try to defend her against these attacks, but, going by news reports, he appears to have done more harm than salvage the situation.

“Look, I love my wife so much,” he told Megyn Kelly on her SiriusXM show. “Obviously, she’s not a white person, and we’ve been accused — attacked — by some white supremacists over that,” he continued. “But I just — I love Usha. She’s such a good mom, she’s such a brilliant lawyer and I’m so proud of her.”Her experience has “helped give him the perspective that it’s very hard for working families in America,” he added. 

His comments come after far-right political commentator Nick Fuentes attacked Usha earlier this month, Ben Blanchet wrote in Huff Post “Who is this guy, really, Feuntes questioned about Vance. “Do we really expect that the guy who has an Indian wife and named their kid Vivek is going to support white identity,” he wondered. 

Critics on social media questioned JD Vance’s defense, including Kaivan Shroff, a Democratic commentator who shared the clip of the Ohio senator and called it “such a weird” and “pathetic” way to respond to the attacks.

Vance has also been receiving ire on his “single cat ladies,” comment which has unleashed fury among women, “with many now reclaiming the age-old sexist trope as a call to action this election season,” NPR reported. In a 2021 interview with Fox News host Tucker Carlson, then-Senate-candidate Vance complained that the U.S. was being run by Democrats, corporate oligarchs and “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too” Pointing at Vice President Kamala Harris, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — “the entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children,” Vance continued. “And how does it make any sense that we’ve turned our country over to people who don’t really have a direct stake in it?”

Usha was raised as a Hindu and continues to practice the faith. “I did grow up in a religious household, my parents are Hindu, and I think that was one of the things that made them such good parents, that makes them really very good people,” she told Fox News in a recent interview. Vance added during the same interview that his “wife’s faith was a key factor in his decision to re-engage with Christianity later in his life,” which he said Usha has been supportive of. 

Vance has often praised Usha in interviews, describing her as a “powerful female voice” and saying that she holds considerable influence over his career. Vance has often praised Usha in interviews, describing her as a “powerful female voice” and saying that she holds considerable influence over his career. “Usha definitely brings me back to Earth a little bit, and if I maybe get a little bit too cocky or a little too proud, I just remind myself that she is way more accomplished than I am,” Vance said in an interview on the “Megyn Kelly Show” podcast in 2020.  “I’m one of those guys who really benefit from having, like, a sort of powerful female voice on his left shoulder saying, ‘Don’t do that, do that’—it just is important.”

As The New York Times noted in a profile on Usha, she has “played a quiet but significant role in her husband’s rise.” At Yale, she “helped Vance organize his ideas about social decline in rural white America, which formed the basis of “Hillbilly Elegy.”

Usha and Vance have been married since 2014 and have three children — Ewan, 7, Vivek, 4, and Mirabel, 2. In a 2017 interview with NBC News, she said she and Vance met while they were both law students at Yale. She said she was attracted to Vance in part because of his positive attitude. “He felt very different,” she told Megyn Kelly.