As she took the stage, Usha Chilukuri surveyed the excited crowd dressed in red, white, and blue Vans, flag quilts, wide-brimmed cowboy hats, and sequin elephant earrings.
She smiled broadly, although a bit nervously.
This was her debut at the Republican National Convention. She admits right from the start: when she was asked to introduce her husband, Senator J.D. Vance of Ohio, she wasn’t sure what to say.
“I thought there was only one thing to do: explain from the heart why I love and admire J.D. and support him here.”
Vice presidential candidate JD Vance takes the stage with his wife Usha at the 2024 Republican National Convention. The two met while attending Yale Law School.
(Robert Gauthier/Los Angeles Times)
The 38-year-old California native and child of Indian immigrants may not seem like a cheerleader for Donald Trump’s MAGA movement, at least not on the surface.
She is a former Democrat who registered as a Republican just a few years ago. Politically savvy, she spent years avoiding the harshness of cultural wars.
As a corporate lawyer, she has laboriously amassed many of the elite academic and corporate credentials that provoke disdain from a new generation of Republican populists. Until this week, when her husband became Trump’s running mate, she worked as a litigator at a top law firm in San Francisco.
But Vance has worked for famous conservative judges: Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh when he served on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.
In her new role as a loyal MAGA wife and potential second lady of the United States, she kept her distance from politics as she headed to the convention.
She began a sweet romance with the Republican agitator, attacking universities and Wall Street as enemies, supporting Trump’s unfounded claims of electoral fraud, and suggesting that deporting 20 million immigrants would drive down housing prices for Americans.
When she met her future husband at Yale, she said, “He was then, as he is now, the most interesting person I knew.”
“A working-class man who overcame childhood trauma that I can barely understand,” she added. “A tough Marine who served in Iraq, but whose idea of a good time was playing with puppies and watching the movie ‘Babe.’”
Her husband, she said, was the kind of “meat and potatoes” guy who adapted to her vegetarian diet and learned to cook Indian food for her mother.
It wasn’t exactly red meat for the base. But there were plenty of Republicans. Just before her speech, Donald Trump Jr. denounced “the clumsy and ruined Biden” and chanted “War! War! War!”.
That wasn’t her style. If Usha Vance has a role in today’s Republican Party, it presents a gentler version of republicanism to Americans in battleground states who may feel disheartened by division, authoritarianism, and Trump’s criminal convictions.
So she presented their love story as a modern and fully American tale of a blue-collar boy from a Rust Belt town in Ohio and an Indian-American girl from the suburbs of San Diego. “That JD and I met, fell in love, and married is a testament to this great country,” she said.
The crowd cheered and applauded, but the applause was quieter than that for Donald Trump Jr.
Still, Republican strategists say she did her job.
“She did exactly what we knew she could do: she introduced her husband, and he came through,” said Joy Chabria, a friend, adviser, and former campaign strategist for JD Vance’s Senate run.
She praised her authenticity and noted that she wrote her own speech.
“That is the secret weapon,” Chabria said. “Look, this is not the life she wants, the political spotlight. But she is an incredible storyteller of their lives.”
Usha Chilukuri, a second-generation Indian, grew up in the suburb of Rancho Penasquitos in northeast San Diego, an area that was once strongly Republican and has become more liberal and diverse after waves of immigrants arrived and the biotech industry flourished.
She is the daughter of educators. Her mother is a marine molecular biologist and chancellor of UC San Diego, and her father is an aerospace engineer and professor at San Diego State University.
She excelled at Mount Carmel High School and earned a reputation as a fierce competitor among her peers.
“It’s not enough to know the answers, you have to do it fast,” a 17-year-old Usha told the San Diego Union-Tribune while practicing for her high school trivia championship.
She studied history at Yale and then went to England for a graduate fellowship at the University of Cambridge. Her curriculum on early modern history was esoteric: it focused on John Field, a printer who worked in London and Cambridge from 1642 to 1668, and she researched the development of copyright law in 17th century England.
When she returned to Yale to study law and met James Hammel, who was known in college as J.D. Vance, she was adept at navigating an institution she barely understood.
“Usha was like a guide to my Yale soul,” he wrote in his memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy.” “She instinctively understood the questions I didn’t even know to ask and always encouraged me to seek opportunities I didn’t know existed.”
He was struck.
“She seemed like a genetic anomaly, a combination of all the positive qualities a man should have: brilliant, hardworking, tall, and beautiful,” he wrote.
Usha Vance offered advice on how to polish his writing. She urged him to attend office hours and connect with his professors, even giving him tips on how to use cutlery at fancy corporate dinners.
Voter registration records document that Usha Vance was a registered Democrat in 2014, a year after graduating. But she was clearly not political in college.
“I don’t even remember a political conversation with Usha,” said Eliot Forhan, a Democratic state representative from Ohio who attended Yale Law School with the couple and took an antitrust class with her. “I remember she was very fashionable, but she didn’t show her cards when it came to her political opinions.”
It wasn’t unusual. Many Yale law students were cautious about making political comments, Forhan said, for fear of losing favor and a coveted clerkship. But JD Vance was different. He openly embraced conservative beliefs and organized a reading group around the writings of Edmund Burke, the Anglo-Irish statesman and philosopher considered the founder of modern conservatism.
They graduated in 2013. They married in 2014 and now have three children, Ewan, Vivek, and Mirabel.
Vance moved to the Bay Area in San Francisco. JD worked in biotechnology while Usha became an associate at Munger, Tolles & Olson, one of the nation’s top corporate law firms representing companies like Airbnb, Meta, Google, and Disney. As described by the firm, American Lawyer magazines referred to it as “radically progressive” and “a leading contender in the cool and woke category” due to its diverse initiatives, generous parental leave, and openness to remote work.
The Vances immersed themselves in the social scene of San Francisco, volunteering in their local community garden and networking with lawyers and tech leaders. But they continued to advance their careers. In 2017, the year she gave birth to their first child, Ewan, they moved to Washington so she could work as a clerk for Roberts.
A year ago, her husband took the national stage with “Hillbilly Elegy,” his memoir that addresses generations of unemployment, opioid addiction, and poverty in white rural America.
This time, JD Vance emerged as a Never Trumper. In an article in The Atlantic, he said Trump offered overly simplistic solutions to complex problems. “He never details how these plans will work because he can’t,” he wrote. “Trump’s promise pokes the common vein of America.”
Donald and Melania Trump joined Usha and JD Vance at the Republican National Convention on Thursday night.
(Robert Gauthier/Los Angeles Times)
But JD Vance apologized to Trump when he ran for Senate in 2022.
He backed Trump after the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol, which raised doubts about the 2020 election outcome and suggested that Vice President Mike Pence erred by refusing to certify Joe Biden’s victory, and agreed to support Trump. He won and took office in January 2023.
Usha Vance rejects the notion that her husband has betrayed his values or, as some critics accuse, sold out to Trump. On the Milwaukee stage, she said, “The JD I met then is the JD you see today, without the beard.”
But even if the Ivy League lawyer, known for his inquisitive analytical skills, understood the thread running through JD Vance’s political journey, he didn’t try to explain it to the American people.
JD Vance’s goals as a vice presidential candidate, he said, were the same as his goals as a husband and father: “keeping people safe, creating opportunities, building a better life, and solving problems with an open mind.”
When her husband took the stage with her, she kissed him.
Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) embraces his wife Usha as they arrive to speak during the Republican National Convention on Wednesday.
(Jason Armond/Los Angeles Times)
They exchanged a long embrace before the hall filled with the country tune “America First” by Merle Haggard.
She did her job. She humanized her husband. Then she returned to the sidelines.
