The election is one week away. And we’ve barely seen or heard from Usha Vance at all throughout the whole cycle. She gave one speech at the RNC and a couple of cable news interviews. Other than that, she’s been in the wind. It’s notable because Donald Trump’s wife has also been largely absent from the campaign trail, and it’s notable because Trump is in such poor physical and mental health, it feels almost certain that JD Vance would end up becoming president, if the Trump-Vance ticket actually won. Which would make the Vances two of the most unvetted and unexamined people to ever reside in the White House. I’m glad that The Cut at least attempted to speak to people who have known Usha Vance throughout her life and that at least someone is trying to unpack the enigma of Usha. You can read the Cut piece here. Some highlights:
Usha’s silence: As her husband’s arc in public life has been distinguished by his willingness to say absolutely anything, at great length and often eloquently, to get ahead, Usha has seemed to intentionally say as little as she can get away with. She has largely kept her own beliefs — political and otherwise — inscrutable even to those close to her. She declined to be interviewed for this story, but my conversations with her friends and associates from college, law school, and judicial clerkships were remarkably uniform. I was told that Usha was well liked, academically and professionally impressive, and that her inner life was a black box. “She didn’t seem to have strong emotions,” a law-school classmate and former friend said. “It didn’t seem like things got to her that much, and she was never very vulnerable.” The classmate added, sincerely, “I kind of wonder if she’s a sociopath.”
Appalled by Trump? Many people who knew Usha in the years before J.D. went MAGA wonder how this nonwhite daughter of immigrants, a former registered Democrat and successful beneficiary of some of the most elite institutions in the world, could stomach the realities of the Trump-Vance ticket. There is at least some evidence that Usha is holding her nose as she participates, or at least that she would like people to believe she is: In July, an unnamed friend told the Washington Post that Usha had found the January 6 attack “deeply disturbing” and was “generally appalled by Trump.” J.D. was always a conservative, but his turn to election-denying, immigrant-libeling, childless-woman-hating did not begin until his first declared run for office in 2021. “Initially, I thought, Surely she can’t be okay with this, and she’s going to divorce him in time,” said the ex-friend. “Then I saw her at the Republican National Convention and thought, Could she actually be onboard?”
When Usha met JD: Usha and J.D. met in their very first days at Yale Law. The two were assigned to the same “small group,” a cohort that takes all their classes together in their first semester. In Hillbilly Elegy, J.D. describes quickly falling for Usha because she was “a combination of every positive quality a human being should have: bright, hardworking, tall, and beautiful.” A classmate who was friendly with them both, Christopher Lapinig, now an attorney in Los Angeles, recalled it somewhat differently. “I distinctly remember him saying that one of the biggest things, maybe the biggest thing, that drew him to her was her ambition,” he told me. “It said something that J.D., in this school of generally ambitious, high-achieving people, found Usha to be especially ambitious above and beyond the average YLS student.”
JD Vance once wanted to be a stay-at-home dad: J.D. seemed to take Chua’s advice. Sofia Nelson, who ended a close friendship with J.D. when he publicly declared his support for an Arkansas ban on trans health care for minors, says that near the end of law school, J.D. told her that he was open to being a stay-at-home dad. Usha and J.D. got engaged near the end of their final year at YLS. It was important to J.D. that their family, unlike the one of his childhood, all share the same name, and Hamel, his surname at the time, came from a stepfather who was only in his life briefly. J.D. told at least two friends that he was open to taking Usha’s last name, Chilukuri. In the end, the two chose Vance, the name of the maternal grandparents who largely raised him.
Hillbilly Elegy was published in 2016: According to former friends and acquaintances, the book’s overwhelming success put J.D.’s career in the front seat. The memoir — of a difficult midwestern and Appalachian childhood, sprinkled with punditry about white working-class culture — was fortuitously timed, appearing in late June 2016, roughly four months before the presidential election, and it was received as a skeleton key to understanding Trump voters, even as Vance robustly criticized Trump and broadcast that he’d voted for the independent Evan McMullin. Usha, J.D. told a friend at the time, voted for Hillary Clinton.
JD’s language began to change in 2020: On the campaign trail, J.D. began referring to his children as belonging to Usha. “My wife has three little kids” he told a conservative radio host in Ohio after Roe v. Wade was overturned in 2022, as if they were born through parthenogenesis. “She’s got three kids,” he said this October to the New York Times’ Lulu Garcia-Navarro. Now, when J.D. is asked to talk about paid family leave or what it is about American culture he believes is hostile to childbearing, as he was at the vice-presidential debate, he often describes Usha as a “working mother” without implying that he himself has anything to juggle. He has come a long way from the would-be stay-at-home dad who put his wife’s career first.
Seeing their history laid out like this, I definitely think the hinge on their marriage was the success of Hillbilly Elegy. Before JD’s book was published, the plan absolutely seemed to be that Usha was the go-getter, that she had the more dynamic career, that he would support her wherever she needed to go, even if it meant that he was a stay-at-home dad. Then everything shifted with the book and suddenly JD was the one being groomed for Republican stardom. Suddenly, within the space of two years, JD became a chauvinist pig who resented his wife’s career and every woman’s career. Suddenly, all he cared about was getting women out of the workforce and tied to abusive men who use those women as baby factories and indentured servants. But going back to Usha’s ambition… that’s why she’s staying, right? While she might hate what her husband says, she loves the power and hey, she might get to be First Lady.
Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, Cover Images, screencaps from Fox News.