Usha Vance's new life in Trump's Washington

The Star

a day ago

SHE has settled her three children into new schools, set up play dates and overseen the childproofing of her home.
She takes the children to the second lady's office overlooking the Washington Monument, attends Mass with her family in the Virginia suburbs and hikes on wooded trails around Washington, the Secret Service in tow.
She has a warm relationship with the president of the United States, who marvels over her academic credentials and tells her she is beautiful, a senior administration official said. She gets along with Melania Trump, the first lady, too.
Less than a year ago, Usha Vance, onetime Democrat and the daughter of immigrants, was living a radically different life as a litigator for a progressive law firm while raising her children in Ohio. Many old friends are bewildered by her transformation. She may be the wife of the vice president, they say, but she must be appalled by the Trump administration's attacks on academia, law firms, judges, diversity programs and immigrants.
Others say she likes the respite from her legal career and the glamour and influence of her new role. She always supported her husband's ambitions, they note, even if she did not necessarily share them. People close to the vice president, who went from being a vocal critic of now-President Donald Trump to his running mate, argue that Vance went on a similar but less public journey that soured her on the left.
Either way, colleagues say, she is a model, at least for now, of a movement embraced by the White House and pushed by her husband that encourages women to have more children and celebrate the family as the centrepiece of American life.
'I think she's doing a great job as second lady of the United States,' Vice President JD Vance said in March in Bay City, Michigan, with Usha standing behind him.
'And here's the thing: Because the cameras are all on, anything that I say, no matter how crazy, Usha has to smile and laugh and celebrate it.'
Online critics slammed the vice president for sexism. But those who know the couple say that no matter her silence in public, JD Vance leans on his wife's counsel in private.
'Her influence on her husband is incalculable,' said the senior Trump administration official, who has worked with Usha on and off for the past year and asked not to be named in order to speak freely.
The official described the second lady as someone who has 'well considered' opinions on marriage, politics and faith, but holds herself at reserve.
If Usha, 39, is not happy with all aspects of the Trump White House, friends say she would never let on. 'Her history and her upbringing suggest it,' the administration official said, 'but she's married to JD, and at some point you have to accept it.'
When Vance became Trump's running mate in the summer of 2024, Usha quit her job and threw herself into the vice-presidential campaign. — EMILY ELCONIN/The New York Times
The Vances have babysitters but no live-in nanny, and JD Vance leaves the West Wing many early evenings to have dinner with his family and help put the children to bed. The Vances have also taken their three children, now eight, five and three, on official international trips, including to Good Friday services at the Vatican and to dinner in New Delhi with the prime minister of India.
Usha declined to be interviewed for this article.
Only recently has she tiptoed out on her own and offered a glimpse of herself and the purpose she sees in her new role. On June 1, she announced on social platform X the 'Second Lady's 2025 Summer Reading Challenge' for children, driven by her view that reading is an antidote to modern distractions, including her own.
From the start, back when they first met at Yale Law School, Usha has been her husband's guide to the elite and a cool salve for his hot temper. One friend of the couple said he would not be vice president without her.
'I'm one of those guys who really benefits from having sort of a powerful female voice over his left shoulder saying, 'Don't do that, do that,'' JD Vance told Megyn Kelly in 2020. For a long time it was his grandmother, Mamaw. 'Now it's Usha,' he said.
Unlike JD Vance, whose roots are in a dysfunctional family of the white underclass captured in his bestselling memoir, Hillbilly Elegy , Usha is the eldest of two daughters of accomplished Indian immigrants, Krish and Lakshmi Chilukuri. They arrived in California in the early 1980s.
The Chilukuris settled in Rancho Peñasquitos, a planned San Diego neighbourhood, where their home today is worth US$1.4mil (RM5.92mil). Vance's father, Krish, worked as an aerospace engineer at United Technologies and Collins Aerospace for 30 years and is now a lecturer at San Diego State. Lakshmi, Vance's mother, is a molecular biologist and the provost of Sixth College, an undergraduate school at the University of California, San Diego.
Vance blazed her way through the local Mount Carmel High School, Yale College, a teaching fellowship in China and a prestigious Gates Foundation scholarship at the University of Cambridge in Britain. She wrote in the Gates scholars' yearbook that her interests were 'exploring urban neighbourhoods, cooking & green markets, long walks, panicking about law school.'
Whatever worries she may have had, friends describe her as a picture of confidence when she was back at Yale in 2010 to start law school. She and JD Vance were soon assigned as partners on a major writing assignment. He was awestruck.
'She seemed some sort of genetic anomaly, a combination of every positive quality a human being should have: bright, hardworking, tall and beautiful,' he wrote in a widely quoted passage in Hillbilly Elegy.
The feeling was not mutual at first. 'I think it's fair to say that JD was sort of the pedal in the relationship and I was a little bit of the brakes,' she told the crowd at the US.-India forum this month. 'Because I was sort of focused on the schooling part of it.'
The two were married in 2014 in an outdoor wedding in Kentucky, near JD Vance's hometown, and spent the next decade crisscrossing the country. Along the way, Usha gave birth to Ewan in 2017, Vivek in 2020 and Mirabel in 2021.
Usha clerked for Judge Brett Kavanaugh in the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit and for Chief Justice Roberts, and worked for the law firm Munger, Tolles & Olson in San Francisco and Washington. JD Vance became a partner in a venture capital fund co-founded by Peter Thiel, a Silicon Valley billionaire and major Trump supporter.
In 2017, the couple moved to Cincinnati, where Usha Vance worked remotely for Munger. The couple bought a big US$1.4mil Victorian in East Walnut Hills, a liberal-leaning neighbourhood. Usha joined the board of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra and put Post-it notes on wine bottles to remind her husband which were the good ones to use for guests.
A pivotal moment for Usha came in 2018, when Christine Blasey Ford accused Kavanaugh, by then a Supreme Court nominee, of sexually assaulting her at a high school party nearly 40 years earlier. Kavanaugh denied the accusation and was narrowly confirmed, but friends say that Usha was outraged by Democratic attacks on a man she admired.
'My wife worked for Kavanaugh, loved the guy – kind of a dork,' JD Vance told New York Times columnist Ross Douthat last year. 'Never believed these stories.'
When Vance became Trump's running mate in the summer of 2024, Usha quit her job and threw herself into the vice-presidential campaign. She and the children were often on the trail with him, and colleagues say she was a key part of the preparations for his debate with Governor Tim Walz of Minnesota.
Usha has largely stayed out of the fray over the administration's political and policy agenda, even as her husband has continued to be a polarising figure.
The one exception for Usha was in March when she planned a trip to see a national dog sled race in Greenland, which Trump has said he wants to take over from Denmark. Vance made a cheerful video ahead of the trip, but it was ultimately downsized to a brief stop with her husband at a US military base after strong objections from Greenlanders.
In the coming months, Vance says she will continue to roll out second lady projects.
For now, she continues to take her children to her office in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, the one with the view of the Washington Monument. — 2025 The New York Times Company
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.