In 2006, when Usha Vance was still a college junior called Usha Chilukuri, she appeared in the “50 most beautiful people list” of the Yale student magazine, Rumpus.
“The charming Chilukuri says that she doesn’t have particular preferences as far as the less fair sex is concerned,” said the article, “though she does like a man who has a lot to say for himself.”
“In the past, her liaisons have been tall, handsome, and conservative (though she herself is of the leftish political persuasion). However, she says that the future doesn’t necessarily have to imitate the past. So stay hopeful.”
Today, Brittany Hugoboom, the editor-in- chief of conservative women’s magazine Evie, says: “Usha is just really pretty and I like that.” And that just about sums up how little the American public knows – or cares about– the second lady.
The Vances’ story appears to be one of perpetual ideological shifting as they navigate their way to the top
In rawer moments, for instance when Mrs. Vance steps off a plane with her children, hair windswept, she looks youthful and slightly disheveled.
“You can kind of see how natural and organic she is,” says a source close to the second lady. “When it’s them coming from family time, out into the world, she’s literally always smiling. That has nothing to do with the fact of what she’s doing. It is because she likes hanging out with her kids and her husband.”
Those in her orbit will tell you that she is brilliant, that she is with her husband all the time, and that she is a good confidante and a good muse. But she can also seem self-conscious.
Usha Vance was born on January 6, 1986 in San Diego County to a family of academics. Her parents, Lakshmi and Radhakrishna Chilukuri, are Telugu Brahmins, an upper-class group who came to the United States in the 1980s from the southern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh.
After Trump’s victory was announced in 2024, the locals in Usha Vance’s ancestral village celebrated with firecrackers. Her grandfather was a physics professor at an Indian university. Her father is a mechanical engineer who became a lecturer at San Diego State, her mother a molecular biologist who became the provost at UC San Diego. Usha studied history at Yale and researched the 17th-century book trade for her MPhil at Cambridge before going on to Yale Law School.
It is well known that J.D. and Usha Vance were set up in law school by their professor, Amy Chua, who became a household name herself through her book, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother.
“Amy is this super powerful woman who is like a kingmaker. I don’t know how she got so powerful but she picks her favorites and makes them successful, and in this case she picked them to rise up together. I believe they love each other or whatever but I think Yale law unions are usually at least partially political,” a Yale graduate says.
J.D.’s classmates tend say he had an unremarkable personality. Usha apparently kept a much wider social circle. One Vanity Fair profile describes Usha as being “good at playing the game.”
Amy Chua reportedly did not like Usha at first, because she would not gossip and drink, whereas J.D. loved “all that shit,” apparently.
Though she set them up, even Chua describes Usha and J.D. as an improbable match, perhaps because their backgrounds are so different. J.D. was raised by a white, drug-addled mother in Ohio. Usha was brought up by first-generation, Indian immigrants. J.D. now recalls Usha helping him navigate and understand Yale’s delicate social codes.
The conservatives J.D. Vance associated with at Yale happened to all be multi-millionaires, otherwise, he moved in liberal circles. Many of his friends with socially progressive ideas believed he was on their side politically.
What pushed Vance rightward? His former friends give two answers.
The first is that Vance took an internship with Peter Thiel and returned brainwashed. The other is that he always knew how to tell people what they wanted to hear. J.D. and Usha share an ability to network.
Hugoboom thinks it’s appealing and useful that Usha is both beautiful and about to be a mother again. She’s due to give birth in July. The last second lady to give birth while in office was Ellen Colfax in 1870.
Some commentators also believe the fact that she has elementary school children causes the public to expect less from her in terms of her public role. “We don’t really have any expectations for what Usha Vance should or should not do,” says reporter Kara Voght.
“She’s a little bit mysterious because she has this priority that we just haven’t seen the second lady have for a long time.”
A source close to the second lady points toward her child literacy program as an example of Usha’s strategic nous.
“She saw it almost in an analytical sense of running a project and seeing if it would be successful. Then, turning it around this year and making it three times bigger based off the feedback… I don’t know a ton of people in this world that would think of something in that way,” the source said.
Usha was seen with a copy of Emily Wilson’s translation of The Iliad throughout the 2024 election cycle. This makes me think of Wilson’s opening line of The Odyssey: “Tell me about a complicated man, Muse, tell me how he wandered and was lost.”
One way to read Usha and J.D.’s relationship is this: the son of an out-of-control, self-indulgent mother found a wife who was the opposite.
Usha found a man that, if kept on track, could become the president one day.
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