Donald Trump was once likened by Vance to Adolf Hitler. He is now Trump’s vice presidential nominee in 2024. What is Usha, his wife of Indian descent, into politics?
Senator JD Vance of Ohio will become the next vice president of the United States if the current polls are accurate. It would entail having a Vice President from the US with strong ties to India for two consecutive administrations.
Usha Chilukuri, a corporate litigator in San Francisco whose parents are Indian, is Vance’s spouse. The New York Times reported that “the pair were…blessed by a Hindu pundit in a separate ceremony” at their 2014 Kentucky wedding.
Of course, Kamala Harris, the daughter of Jamaican-born Stanford economist Donald Harris and Chennai-born cancer researcher Shyamala Gopalan, is the current vice president of the United States.
First things first: who is JD Vance, the man Donald J. Trump selected as his running mate late on Monday night, July 15, India time, at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee?
Venture capitalist, Yale graduate, and Marine
In Middletown, Ohio, Vance was raised in a modest upbringing. He joined the US Marines after graduating from high school and was a combat journalist and public relations officer during the Iraq War.
He completed his undergraduate studies in political science and philosophy at Ohio State University after serving in the armed forces. After that, he continued his legal studies at Yale Law School, where he served as the Yale Law Journal’s editor.
He briefly practiced law after earning his Yale degree in 2013 before relocating to San Francisco to work as a venture investor in the tech sector. Interestingly, he was employed at Mithril Capital, co-founded by PayPal’s Peter Thiel.
Best-selling author, vociferous Trump critic
With the release of his best-selling book Hillbilly Elegy in 2016, Vance became well-known. Many interpreted Vance’s autobiographical Hillbilly Elegy, published in the same year that Trump stormed to power for the first time, as a window into rural, often-forgotten America, which fueled Trump’s ascent.
Vance’s book was described as “a compassionate, discerning sociological analysis of the white underclass that has helped drive the politics of rebellion, particularly the ascent of Donald J. Trump” in a review that appeared in The New York Times. In 2020, a full-length movie based on the novel was published.
Vance had strong anti-Trump sentiments at the moment. In October 2016, he said to talk show host Charlie Rose, “I’m a Never Trump guy.” In July 2016, Vance penned an opinion piece for The Atlantic titled, “Trump is cultural heroine… Trump’s pledges are the needle in the collective American vein. He temporarily lifts some people’s spirits. However, he cannot cure their problems, and they will eventually realize this.
“I go back and forth between thinking that Trump is America’s Hitler or that he is a cynical asshole like [Richard] Nixon who wouldn’t be that bad (and might even prove useful),” Vance said in a 2016 private Facebook conversation to a friend.
From “Never Trump” to ardent supporter
On Trump, though, Vance has quite different views. According to reports, he supported Trump in 2020 and used his support to win his first Senate election in 2022.
After being chosen as Trump’s running mate, Vance “explained his ideological shifts as a result of a double intellectual awakening: It turned out that Donald Trump wasn’t as bad as Vance had thought, and that American liberals were much worse,” the New York Times said.
“I allowed myself to focus so much on the stylistic element of Trump that I completely ignored the way in which he was offering something very different on foreign policy, on trade, and on immigration,” Vance said in a June interview with The New York Times.
As one of the most tenacious supporters of Trump in the modern era, Vance shares many of the former president’s viewpoints. Furthermore, according to Politico, he has become “the standard-bearer of the ‘New Right,’ a loose movement of young conservatives trying to push the Republican Party in a more populist, nationalist, and culturally conservative direction.”
Married to a brilliant lawyer he met at Yale
While attending Yale, Vance got to know Usha Chilukuri Vance. Together, the couple is the parent of three kids. Usha is Hindu, and Vance is Catholic. Living in Cincinnati, Ohio, is the family.
Usha Chilukuri was known among her peers from her early and adolescent years as a “leader” and a “bookworm” while growing up in a San Diego neighborhood. In a NYT piece, she was characterized as “pragmatist, ambitious, and smart.” She traveled to Cambridge on a Gates Fellowship after four years at Yale, where The New York Times reported that she interacted with “mostly liberal and left-wing circles.”
Usha was a registered Democrat in 2014, according to American media sources, but she hasn’t been outspoken about her political beliefs lately. From 2015 onwards, Usha was employed by Munger, Tolles, and Olson, a legal company that prides itself on having a “radically progressive” corporate culture and “cool” and “woke” employment procedures. According to a story in the Bay Area newspaper SFGate, Usha quit her job “just minutes” after Trump selected her husband to be his running mate in the November election.
According to Usha’s bio, which SFGate cited, she specialized on “complex litigation and appeals in a wide variety of sectors, including higher education, local government, entertainment, and technology, including semiconductors,” during her time at the legal firm.
Additionally, while Justice Brett Kavanaugh was a judge at the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit, she worked as a clerk for Chief Justice John Roberts of the US Supreme Court. According to SFGate, which quoted Usha’s bio, she also worked as a clerk for Amul Thapar, who is currently a judge on the US Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, during his tenure at the US District Court for the Eastern District of Kentucky.
She edited the Yale Law Journal and the Yale Journal of Law & Technology while she was an editor at Yale.
Import of Vance’s selection by Trump
Trump stated that Vance “will be strongly focused on the people he fought so brilliantly for, the American Workers and Farmers in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, Minnesota, and far beyond” in a Truth Social post announcing the appointment. It’s conceivable that a few of these Midwestern states will be crucial to the outcome of the election in November.
Experts predict that Vance’s selection will energize Trump’s supporters since the senator is well-liked in the conservative media. Additionally, it is probably going to go well in Silicon Valley, where Trump is trying to get funding for his campaign. One of Vance’s largest backers is the wealthy former CEO of PayPal, Peter Thiel.
But as Trump tries to reach out to more groups, the choice also means that two white males will now head the Republican ticket. According to Reuters, Vance, a devout conservative from a Republican state, “is unlikely to bring many new voters into Trump’s corner and may even alienate some moderates.”
Supporters of Trump wanted him to choose a woman of color in order to broaden the coalition’s base of influence. It would be fascinating to see if this is an influence if President Joe Biden, who is facing intense pressure to stand down from major Democratic donors and several Democratic legislators, does so in favor of Harris.
