Usha Vance's new life in Trump's Washington

Washington: She has settled her three children into new schools, set up play dates and overseen the childproofing of her 9,000-square-foot 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. (Vance, who clerked for Chief Justice John Roberts and was a top editor on The Yale Law Journal, referred to herself at a recent public appearance as a "former lawyer.") 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 centerpiece 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 Vance 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 Vance 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 Vance 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."

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. He either returns to the White House afterward or works from his office in the vice president's official residence. The Vances have also taken their three children, now 8, 5 and 3, on official international trips, including to Good Friday services at the Vatican and to dinner in New Delhi with the prime minister of India. Both events generated video and photographs of the children with their parents seen all over the world.

"She is kind of an icon of the upsides of married motherhood in America today," said Brad Wilcox, a sociologist and senior fellow at the Institute for Family Studies, referring to the Vances' practice of taking their children to formal adult events. Wilcox has conferred with JD Vance over the past decade about family policy and is now in touch with the White House on the issue.

Usha Vance herself has said little publicly. She gave a lengthy interview this year to The Free Press, journalist Bari Weiss' news and opinion site, which proclaimed her "the most impressive person in the job since Abigail Adams," and told Meghan McCain in an interview for her YouTube show Wednesday that she was "not plotting out next steps" as a potential first lady. "In a dream world eventually I'll be able to live in my home and kind of continue my career and all those sorts of things," she said.

Vance declined to be interviewed for this article, as did a large number of relatives, friends and colleagues. More than a dozen who did offer their perspectives did so on the condition of anonymity out of fear of angering her.

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.

"I'll be honest: I look at my phone far too often," Vance said at a U.S.-India partnership forum in Washington this month. "I, as a lawyer, was constantly receiving email, constantly responding, being quick. And being aware of what's going on at any given moment was an advantage. But it changes the way that you think. And so I myself have been challenging myself to read things that are increasingly challenging, increasingly long, sometimes increasingly boring, in an attempt to really bring that part of myself back."

She spoke with ease and authority to a rapt crowd in the presidential ballroom of the old Trump International Hotel, now the Waldorf Astoria. In a flowing white pantsuit and gray-flecked hair, she presented a vivid contrast to the coifed and tightly sheathed women of the Trump administration.

Vance has just made her way through "Sword of Honor," the trilogy of novels by Evelyn Waugh based on his experiences as an army officer in World War II, according to her account on the Goodreads website. She is currently reading "Trust" by Hernan Diaz, an intricate novel about a secretive New York financier and his wife. During the 2024 presidential campaign, she was frequently spotted with scholar Emily Wilson's celebrated 848-page translation of the "Iliad."

The reading challenge, she said at the forum, is a "bite-sized component of a larger project to continue expanding access to literacy." The goal "is to roll out little things bit by bit and see which ones work and which ones don't and then try to expand the ones that work. As a former lawyer, I get really bored if I don't have projects."

A cool salve for a hot temper

From the start, back when they first met at Yale Law School, Vance 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 Vance is the eldest of two daughters of accomplished Indian immigrants, Krish and Lakshmi Chilukuri, both Brahmins from the South Indian state of Andhra. They arrived in California in the early 1980s with a wave of English-speaking Indian engineers, doctors and scientists seeking opportunities in the United States.

The Chilukuris settled in Rancho Peñasquitos, a planned San Diego neighborhood of Spanish-mission-style houses, where their home today is worth $1.4 million. 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.

In a letter welcoming students back to the campus post-COVID, Chilukuri wrote that "as we come into the new academic year with the pandemic not quite yet in the rearview mirror, with issues of equity and systemic racism, anti-Blackness and anti-Asian racism yet unresolved, we have before us both opportunity and responsibility."

Her parents, Vance told Fox News, "just filled our house with books. My dad went through a phase where he was trying to read all the Nobel laureates."

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. There she studied the development of copyright law in 17th-century England and wrote in the Gates scholars' yearbook that her interests were "exploring urban neighborhoods, 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 U.S.-India forum this month. "Because I was sort of focused on the schooling part of it."

The two were a couple by their second year of law school, when they went to Washington for interviews with law firms. In an episode in his memoir, JD Vance recounted that he had returned dejected to their hotel room one night after feeling he had done badly with a favorite firm. Usha Vance tried to comfort him, he wrote, but he exploded and stormed out into the streets of downtown Washington. Usha Vance chased after him.

"She calmly told me through her tears that it was never acceptable to run away, that she was worried, and that I had to learn how to talk to her," JD Vance wrote.

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 as their jobs moved them from the East Coast to the West Coast and back to the Midwest. Along the way, Usha Vance gave birth to Ewan in 2017, Vivek in 2020 and Mirabel in 2021.

Vance clerked for Judge Brett Kavanaugh in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. 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, after "Hillbilly Elegy" had become a critically acclaimed explanation of the Trump working class to the elite, the couple moved to Cincinnati, where Usha Vance worked remotely for Munger. The couple bought a big $1.4 million Victorian in East Walnut Hills, a liberal-leaning neighborhood. Vance 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 hearing

A pivotal moment for Usha Vance 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 Vance 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."

That same year, JD Vance went to a dinner of the Business Roundtable, a group of top American chief executives. He sat next to the head of a hotel chain who complained, JD Vance has recounted, that Trump's crackdown at the border had cut off the flow of low-wage immigrants, forcing him to hire American workers at higher prices. A friend said that both Vances were appalled by his complaints.

"One of the really deranged things that I think illegal immigration does to our society is it gets us in a mindset of saying we can only build houses with illegal immigrants, when we have 7 million -- just men, not even women, just men -- who have completely dropped out of the labor force," JD Vance told Lulu Garcia-Navarro of the Times in 2024, recalling his encounter with the hotel chain executive. Americans will do those jobs, Vance said, but not for "below-the-table wages."

Yet another pivotal moment came in November 2020, when friends say the Vances were hurt by the widely panned reaction to the film version of "Hillbilly Elegy." By then the book had lost some of its luster as criticism grew that it was a vehicle to advance Vance's political career.

Less than a year later, he announced he was running for the U.S. Senate from Ohio. Although JD Vance had publicly called Trump "reprehensible" and "cultural heroin" and privately referred to him as "America's Hitler," he began to soften his stance in 2018 and by 2020 had endorsed Trump for president. Vance in turn won his 2022 Senate race with a crucial endorsement from Trump.

When Vance became Trump's running mate in the summer of 2024, Usha Vance quit her job at Munger 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 Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota.

Becoming Second Lady

JD Vance has talked of how much Usha Vance, who is Hindu, supported his conversion to Catholicism. "She thought that thinking about the question of converting and getting baptized and becoming a Christian, she thought they were good for me, in sort of a good-for-your-soul kind of way," JD Vance said in the interview with Garcia-Navarro. "And I don't think I would have ever done it without her support."

He has also spoken of how Usha Vance embraces his pro-family policies. After JD Vance infamously denigrated "childless cat ladies," he told Garcia-Navarro that the comment "actually distracted -- my wife made this point -- distracted from the core point of what I was making, which is that there is something very anti-family and very anti-child that has crept into American society. And you see it, I think, if you take your kid on an airplane. You see it if you take your kid to a restaurant and people huff and puff at you. You see it in some of our political policies."

Usha Vance has largely stayed out of the fray over the administration's political and policy agenda, even as her husband has continued to be a polarizing figure. At one point, he defended a far-right party in Germany, and at another, he successfully called for the reinstatement of an aide to Elon Musk who had quit after the revelation of racist posts he made on X.

The one exception for Usha Vance 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 U.S. 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.

She will continue events like "Camp VPR" -- for vice president's residence -- which she held this month for 200 children on some of the 73 acres surrounding her home. She is starting to get involved with the Special Olympics.

"If the project is going to take up all my time, that's wonderful," she said at the U.S.-India forum. "And if not, then we'll add some more."