Who is Usha Vance? JD Vance's wife played a quiet supportive role

Usha Vance, the wife of Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance, played the role of supportive wife during the campaign. Nevertheless, the lawyer was subjected to intensive scrutiny: her professional career was analyzed, her image was compared to that of other women in Donald Trump's environment and, above all, there was a lot of speculation about her politics.

Usha Vance, who comes from a family of academics, has had an extremely successful legal career. She studied At the prestigious Yale Law School, he clerked for Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh when he was an appeals court judge and then worked as a law clerk Chief Justice John Roberts. She then worked as a trial attorney at Munger, Tolles & Olson, a position she left when her husband became Trump's vice president.

The child of Indian immigrants, she grew up in a middle-class neighborhood in San Diego and met her future husband at Yale. The couple married in 2014 and have three children.

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JD Vance has spoken a lot about his wife. In an interview on Megyn Kelly's podcast in 2020, he said: “I'm one of those guys who really benefits from having kind of a powerful female voice over his left shoulder saying, 'Don't do that; Do that.'” He added that she now serves as a guiding light for him.

Her husband's extreme views have become well known, but Usha Vance's politics remain largely a question mark. She has reportedly leaned liberal or centrist in the past. According to the New York Times, she was a registered Democrat as recently as 2014. In July, The Washington Post reported that some of her friends and associates looked on in “disbelief” as she spoke at the Republican National Convention, where her husband was officially in attendance as Trump's vice presidential nominee.

Usha Vance has accompanied her husband on the campaign trail, but she has largely avoided taking on a public role of her own. Since her husband's nomination, she has conducted just one media interview – with Fox News – in which she defended her husband's disparaging comments about “childless cat ladies” as merely a “joke.”

She has been the target of racist attacks from the right – including from white nationalist Nick Fuentes, who is associated with Trump. Still, she has given no public indication that she does not support her husband's political transition from conservative Never Trumper to torchbearer for the next generation of the MAGA movement.

In her interview with Fox News in August, Usha Vance said that she and her husband sometimes disagree on political issues, but she believes in his “intent.”

“We’re two different people – we have a lot of different backgrounds and interests and things like that,” she said. “That’s why we constantly come to different conclusions. But that's part of the fun of getting married. And what I never doubt about JD, even if I disagree on this or that point, is his intention, what he really wants to do.”