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Before JD Vance became the vice president of the United States, he was a young law student trying to impress firms in DC and New York. In his second year at Yale Law, he was invited by the law firm Gibson Dunn to a dinner at a fancy restaurant. The meal was like an informal interview on the way to the real interview, which would come later at the office. It was his chance to be funny, smart, and impressive, all while staying humble.
But when JD sat down at the table, he felt out of place, he writes in his memoir, Hillbilly Elegy. Growing up in a small Ohio town, he wasn’t used to fancy restaurants. He had no idea what to order, he didn’t understand the different types of wines, and he didn’t know that “sparkling” water just meant fizzy water. The nine separate utensils at his place setting made his head spin.
“Why do I need three spoons? Why were there multiple butter knives?” he wondered.
He needed help. So JD Vance excused himself and headed to the bathroom, quickly pulling out his phone. He called the one person who could get him through it, the person he called his “spirit guide” – his girlfriend at the time, Usha Chilukuri.
“What do I do with all these damned forks?” he asked Usha when she picked up. “I don't want to make a fool of myself.”
Usha explained, “Go from the outside to inside, and don’t use the same utensil for separate dishes. Oh, and use the fat spoon for soup.”
Feeling slightly more prepared for the dinner to continue, JD went back to the table. The rest of the night passed without incident, and he landed a job offer.
It was not the last time JD would turn to Usha for help. The couple, who got together in law school and later married, has been inseparable ever since. He relies on her counsel.
Different backgrounds
Many, including former friends of the couple, marvel at Usha’s new role in the Republican world. They question how Usha, the daughter of immigrants, went from being a registered Democrat and "generally appalled by Trump” to standing by her husband as he became Trump’s running mate.
Even though she prefers to keep her political opinions out of the spotlight, she has always pushed her husband to aim higher and do more. Usha hasn’t just supported JD as he became Trump’s right-hand man, she also played a big part in helping him get there.
Usha Chilukuri was born in 1986 to Hindu Indian immigrant parents who moved to Southern California more than 10 years earlier. Her father, an aerospace engineer, and mother, a molecular biologist, settled in Rancho Peñasquitos, one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in San Diego. Both of her parents became academics – her father, Radhakrishna “Krish” Chilukuri, is a lecturer at San Diego State University while her mother, Lakshmi Chilukuri, is the provost at the University of California, San Diego.
Born to lead
In high school, Usha was both competitive and a total “bookworm,” according to her classmates. She kept a small group of close friends and was always driven to succeed at Mount Carmel High School. Usha played the flute in the marching band and participated in trivia contests. In 2004, as a teenager living in San Diego, she registered as a Democrat. All the while, Usha excelled in her classes, and was accepted to Yale University as an undergraduate.
After graduating from Yale with honors, she took part in a Yale fellowship program, teaching English and American studies at Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou, China.
She’s an organizer
Her ambition showed in her meticulous organizational skills, which became obvious to everyone around her in China. Another Yale graduate, Peter Hamilton, who was part of the program, once walked into Usha’s room and was shocked to see her walls were covered with hundreds of color-coded Post-Its, that broke down her week into 15- or 30-minute chunks.
Hamilton said, “It was kind of intense. It really stuck with me… I always thought of Usha as quite serious and highly intelligent, in a well-plotted-out kind of way.”
Usha ended her two-year fellowship in China after just one year because she was accepted to Cambridge University for a master’s degree. There, she took part in the Gates Cambridge scholarship program, and focused on the “career of John Field, a printer who operated between 1642 and 1668 in London and Cambridge.” Her thesis “investigated the methods used for protecting printing rights in 17th-century England.”
And then, it was back to Yale, this time for law school.
This decision would change her life forever – because at Yale, she met JD. In his memoir, he writes that he “fell hard” for Usha, admiring her “great sense of humor and an extraordinarily direct way of speaking.” He had “never met anyone like her.”
Christopher Lapinig, a classmate who was friends with both Usha and JD, recalled, “I distinctly remember him saying that one of the biggest things, maybe the biggest thing, that drew him to her was her ambition. It said something that JD, in this school of generally ambitious, high-achieving people, found Usha to be especially ambitious above and beyond the average [Yale Law School] student.”
JD and Usha were paired up on a project and quickly became fast friends. Near the end of their first year, he asked her out, and after a single date, he told her he loved her. The two were inseparable after that.
In his memoir, JD writes, “She instinctively understood the questions I didn’t even know to ask, and she always encouraged me to seek opportunities I didn’t know existed.”
"Usha was teaching JD about the subtler aspects about being at an elite institution," said Charles Tyler, a former law school classmate of Usha’s. "Usha was his guide throughout the process."
That guidance made a noticeable difference. A friend who attended Yale with the couple, Dan Driscoll, said, “She unequivocally increased his odds of success.”
All the while, Usha impressed her fellow classmates with her smarts and detailed notes, but kept most personal opinions to herself. She didn’t join any Democrat or Republican groups on campus, instead focusing her time on the Yale Law Journal, where she was part of the managing board.
Doug Lieb, the editor-in-chief of the journal when Usha was working on the board, said, “People respected her intelligence. She was not the sort of person who was trying to provoke controversy.”
Even though she didn’t talk much about politics, Usha re-registered as a Democrat while in law school in 2010. During her final year, she also hinted at some interest in Democratic leaders. In their last semester at Yale Law, Usha tagged JD in a post on Facebook that read, “Driving through Arkansas, listening to Bill Clinton tell us about his life. Best road trip ever.”
JD and Usha graduated in 2013 and got engaged. A law school friend remembers JD saying he was open to being a stay-at-home dad. It was also important to him that his future family all had the same last name, something he never had growing up. JD even told two friends that he was open to taking Usha’s maiden name. In the end, they settled on Vance, in honor of JD’s grandparents who had helped raise him.
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After law school
The couple applied for clerkships together and both landed jobs with different judges in the same courthouse in Kentucky. Later, Usha and JD asked those two judges to co-officiate their wedding in 2014. They were married outdoors in Kentucky, with their guests seated on wooden benches, and later had a separate Hindu ceremony.
After they were married, Usha pursued prestigious clerkships, working for Judge Brett Kavanaugh while he was on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit and later for Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts.
Usha’s clerkship with Chief Justice Roberts began just weeks after she gave birth to her first child in 2017. Meanwhile, JD was working on his book, Hillbilly Elegy. JD later said that Usha read the manuscript "literally dozens of times," and provided feedback.
The book was a huge success, and the couple moved to San Francisco. Usha took a job as a litigation associate at Munger, Tolles & Olson, a firm known for its progressive values, which didn’t always match her husband’s later political views. In 2019, The American Lawyer called the firm “a top contender in the cool, woke category.” Its website highlights its “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Committee” and its welcoming attitude toward “intersex, transgender, non-binary, and gender nonconforming people.” According to The New York Times, Usha’s coworkers saw her as a “moderate” but she didn’t talk much about politics.
The couple also started making more money. Usha’s salary at the law firm isn’t public, but according to Glassdoor, a job and recruiting site that gives insight on salaries at various companies, the median salary for a litigation associate is $291,541. In San Francisco, JD worked for three different venture capital firms, including one owned by billionaire tech entrepreneur Peter Thiel, who had been his mentor and idol while in college. By 2024, the couple’s net worth was estimated to be between $4.8 million and $11.3 million.
Friends of the couple say that even though JD became successful, he still wouldn’t be where he is without Usha. While balancing her job at the law firm and raising their children, she also managed her husband’s schedule and even helped him find a personal assistant, interviewing the candidates herself.
On the move
The couple would eventually move back to Ohio, with JD saying he wanted to be closer to home. Some law school friends had previously thought Usha would go on to become a lawyer or a judge, but as JD’s fame grew, his career became the focus. A former Yale classmate, J.J. Snidow, said, “I suspect she would’ve stayed at Munger and led their appellate practice and been a really high-profile litigator.”
They had two more children together, and Usha continued to work remotely for Munger, Tolles & Olson. In 2018, they bought a 5,000 square foot Victorian Gothic house in Cincinnati that cost $1.4 million and dates back to 1858.
In 2022, JD decided to capitalize on the recognition he was receiving from his book and run for office. His campaign was heavily funded by a $15 million donation from his former boss, Thiel. In his first campaign ad, Usha was prominently featured. Sitting at a table, Usha told the audience, “Our family’s story is an Ohio story,” even though this was her first time living in Ohio.
But she was “more than a spouse during that campaign,” said Jai Chabria, a strategist for JD’s Senate run. “She worked on that ad script.” JD also acknowledged her influence on his life during an interview with Megyn Kelly, saying he was “one of those guys who really benefits from having like a sort of, powerful female voice in his left shoulder saying, ‘Don’t do that, do do that.’” He said the voice used to be his grandmother. Now, he said, “It’s Usha.”
Just like they were inseparable in college, JD and Usha seemed united in their views on Trump for a long time – even as those views began to change. For years, Usha frequently shared links to JD’s interviews on Facebook, including one where he compared Trump to “cultural heroin.” It read: “He makes some feel better for a bit. But he cannot fix what ails them, and one day they’ll realize it.” In her post, Usha praised her husband’s “firm stand against Trump.”
Shifting views
But JD’s stance on Trump – and his political views – began to change when he was running for Senate. JD told alt-right podcaster Jack Murphy that he rejected the elite community that he was a part of, like Silicon Valley and the Ivy League. He said he felt those communities judged him not by his character or his role as a husband and father but by his career achievements. “I would be judged on, did I get a Supreme Court clerkship, did I work at a fancy bank or consulting or law firm,” JD said. “I just realized to myself, this is an incredibly hollow and even gross way to think about character and virtue.”
He didn’t mention Usha’s feelings on the matter, though she still worked for a Silicon Valley law firm at the time. When her lean to the right began is less clear, though it seems to coincide with her husband’s shift from being a “never Trump guy” to a Trump supporter. During Trump’s first administration, when JD was still critical of him – especially following the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol – Usha told friends that Trump’s role in the insurrection was “deeply disturbing." But when JD began doing interviews as a potential running mate to Trump, his wife was by his side.
Usha defended her husband when he was criticized for calling Democratic politicians “childless cat ladies,” saying his remarks were a “quip” and encouraged people to consider the larger context, that his concerns were about the larger struggles of working-class Americans. In an interview with Fox News, she admitted that she doesn’t always agree with her husband politically, but said she never doubts his intentions.
And in 2021, she donated to a conservative Senate candidate in Arizona who was also supported by Thiel. In 2022, the year JD ran for Senate, Usha registered as a Republican.
Tyler, Usha’s friend from law school, said, "The reason so many people have difficulty characterizing her politics is not because she keeps her cards close to the vest, it's because she doesn't conform to the kind of ideological tribes that most of us have identified with."
(JD would later downplay the events of Jan. 6, calling the jailed participants “political prisoners.” After returning to office, Trump pardoned all Jan. 6 offenders.)
When JD was announced as Trump’s vice presidential candidate at the Republican National Convention, Usha proudly introduced her husband. She then went and sat down next to her husband’s running mate. A friend of Usha’s who watched the RNC said seeing her seated next to Trump was “surreal.”
Whether she genuinely changed her mind or is just standing by her husband remains unclear. During the campaign, Chabria, who still works as an adviser to JD, said Usha had a “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.” In an October interview, when asked about Usha’s thoughts on JD’s controversial statements and his embrace of Trump, Chabria responded that the couple “don’t do major things without consulting each other.”
As election day neared, Usha said that she hadn’t “given a ton of thought to my own roles and responsibilities.” However, she focused on “the thing that JD asked, and the thing that I certainly agreed to do, is to keep him company.” And that’s what she did. She quit her job at the law firm and became a constant presence on the Trump/Vance campaign trail. She introduced JD at the Republican National Convention and was frequently photographed traveling with him. Before his debate with vice presidential candidate Tim Walz, she offered advice, telling him what to do, what not to do, and offering feedback, “when you say things like this, the meaning gets lost.”
Just like when JD called her to ask about all the fancy dinner table utensils, Usha was there to give her husband the information he needed to succeed. And they did. She organized their move into the Naval Observatory in Washington, DC, the official residence of the vice president and the second lady.
As one of the highest-profile Indian Americans in the country, it's not clear yet how she will shape her role as second lady. But one thing has been clear – she is likely to support her husband, no matter what.