Usha Chilukuri Vance: Is America Ready For an Indian American Second Lady?

- Trumpâs just-announced running mate Sen. J.D. Vance is married to the highly accomplished practicing attorney, whom he met at Yale Law School.

In an interview with Fox News last month, Republican Ohio Senator James David Vance admitted that he would be disappointed if former President Trump didn’t pick him to be his running mate. His wife, Usha Chilukuri Vance, however had noted that the couple is “open” to whatever happens. “I’m not raring to change anything about our lives right now,” she added.
Now, Vance doesnât have to deal with disappointment, but his Indian American wife should be prepared for her profile to rise significantly now that Trump has chosen her husband as his running mate. Vance, 39, a former venture capitalist has held his Senate seat for the state of Ohio for less than two years. The âHillbilly Elegyâ author and lawyer had received a boost from Trump during his 2023 bid for the Senate seat from Ohio. News reports now say that Vance has “returned the favor by defending Trumpâs policies and behavior.”
CNN notes that once “a staunch critic of Trump,” Vance has “transformed into one of his fiercest defenders and is ideologically aligned with the former president, and has become a fixture of the conservative media circuit.” In 2016, he called Trump “dangerous” and “unfit” for office. He had even compared Trump to Hitler.
Trumpâs decision defied speculation early in the campaign that the former president would choose a person of color or a woman to broaden his political base. As the Los Angeles Times notes, the Trump-Vance ticket âcreates the kind of team found throughout American history: two men, both white, though Trump, at 78, is twice as old as the 39-year-old Vance.â
Usha Chilukuri Vance is a practicing attorney, who until July 15 morning, worked as an associate at Munger, Tolles & Olson LLP. SF Gate has reported that she resigned “just minutes after Trump announced that heâd chosen her husband as his vice presidential pick.” Usha confirmed the news of her resignation to SF Gate. âIn light of todayâs news, I have resigned from my position at Munger, Tolles & Olson to focus on caring for our family,â she said. âI am forever grateful for the opportunities Iâve had at Munger and for the excellent colleagues and friends Iâve worked with over the years.â
According to her now deleted bio on the firmâs website, she focused on âcomplex civil litigation and appeals in a wide variety of sectors, including higher education, local government, entertainment, and technology. She worked with the law firmâs San Francisco and Washington, D.C. offices. She has been licensed to practice law in California since June 2016, reported heavy.com, citing public records on the State Bar of California website.
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. âHe felt very different,â she told Megyn Kelly.
The daughter of Indian immigrants, Usha 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.
Usha attended Mt. Carmel High School. She moved to the East Coast for college and earned a bachelorâs degree in history from Yale University in 2007. Friends from her childhood and adolescence described her as a âleaderâ and a âbookworm,” The New York Times said in a profile on Usha.
In 2009, Usha attended the University of Cambridge for a Master of Philosophy degree as a Gates Cambridge Scholar. Her profile on the programâs website explains that she focused on âthe career of John Field, a printer who operated between 1642 and 1668 in London and Cambridgeâ and that her âM.Phil project investigated the methods used for protecting printing rights in seventeenth-century England.â
She then returned to Yale for her law degree. While a student, she served as the executive development editor of the âYale Law Journalâ and as managing editor of the âYale Journal of Law & Technology.â Describing her as “brainy, ambitious and pragmatic,” The Times said “she moved from an extracurricular-studded four years at Yale to a Gates Fellowship at Cambridge, where she moved in mostly liberal and left-wing circles. As Time magazine notes 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, Times says she was registered as a Republican in Ohio and “participated in the stateâs 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.
Per her LinkedIn profile, she served as a clerk for Chief Justice John G. Roberts. Before that, she clerked at the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. She worked for then-Judge Brett Kavanaugh, who was confirmed to the Supreme Court in 2018. Chilukuri also clerked for Judge Amul Thapar at the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Kentucky from 2013 to 2014.
Usha was raised as a Hindu, and continues to practice the faith. âI 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 make them really very good people,â she told Fox News in a recent interview. Vance added during the same interview that his “wifeâs faith was a key factor in his decision to re-engage with Christianity later in his life,” which he says Usha has been supportive of.
Vance has often praised Usha in interviews, describing her as a âpowerful female voiceâ and saying that she holds considerable influence over his career.
âUsha 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,â Vance said in an interview on the âMegyn Kelly Showâ podcast in 2020. âIâm one of those guys who really benefits from having, like, a sort of powerful female voice on his left shoulder saying, âDonât do that, do do thatââit just is important.â
The New York Times noted in a profile on Usha that she has “played a quiet but significant role in her husbandâs rise.” At Yale, she “helped Vance organize his ideas about social decline in rural white America, which formed the basis of “Hillbilly Elegy.â
In a November 2020 profile on the Vances, The Cinemaholic noted that in âHillbilly Elegy,â Vance wrote that âUsha helped him realize that he had baggage from his tumultuous upbringing even after he managed to achieve all his dreams.â She had told him that he had no idea of how to resolve a conflict, he wrote. He feared becoming like his mother, he wrote, but Usha made him see that all he had to do was talk to her to make her see his side of an argument.
During Vance’s run for the Ohio Senate seat, “she made rare but well-choreographed appearances” with him, The Times said. But she wasn’t just a silent partner. In an interview with Newsmax “she seemed to contradict claims that her husband had taken on a populist message in order to succeed politically,” The Times added.
(This story has been updated from an earlier version)
(Photo: Facebook)