Usha Chilukuri the lodestar in JD Vance’s journey, from Yale to Senate

In 2013, the Yale Law School organised a study group on the ‘social decline in white America’. Two students organised this project. One had grown up in poor areas of Ohio where his mother had been a victim of addiction. That student was JD Vance, the Ohio senator picked by Donald Trump to be his running mate. The other student was Usha Chilukuri Vance, the daughter of Hindu Indian immigrants. She wanted to conduct this study group because she was curious about the topic. She was also Vance’s girlfriend.

Vance was smitten the moment he had seen Usha.

“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 his memoir — Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis. Vance’s 2016 memoir was turned into a motion picture in 2020.

“I joked with a buddy that if she had possessed a terrible personality, she would have made an excellent heroine in an Ayn Rand novel, but she had a great sense of humour and an extraordinarily direct way of speaking,” Vance talks about Usha in the memoir.

Usha is now his wife. And as Trump introduced Vance as his vice-presidential choice, Usha stood firmly by his side.

Usha has been Vance’s lodestar, be it in his spiritual or political quest. She is also his sheet anchor, keeping him rooted.

“Usha definitely brings me back to earth,” Vance told Megan Kelly in a podcast. “If I get a little too cocky or a little too proud, I just remind myself that she’s way more accomplished than I.”

JD VANCE CALLS WIFE USHA CHILUKURI A ‘POWERFUL FEMALE’

Usha Chilukuri was a career lawyer. She worked as an associate and is a moderate. She also clerked for Chief Justice Roberts on the Supreme Court.

Vance could charm people, but Usha was his spirit guide, he wrote in his 2016 memoir, Hillbilly Elegy.

“She instinctively understood the questions I didn’t even know to ask,” he wrote.

Vance writes how he is lucky to have such a partner.

“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,” Vance told Megyn Kelly in a podcast.

JD VANCE: FROM ‘NEVER TRUMPER’ TO OHIO SENATE VICTORY

As for Vance, he earned his name by catering to working-class white discontent. He was even a Never Trumper, but soon, he shifted towards the right during his Senate campaign. Although he belonged to a group of Republicans, who had criticised the rise of the “woke capital” and blamed Silicon Valley for it.

Even his wife had changed her political affiliations. Usha was a registered Democrat till 2014, reported the New York Times.

Usha has been supportive of her husband and his politics and never openly criticised them.

In an editorial cartoon by the Plain Dealer, a US newspaper made fun of Vance’s criticism of Cleveland’s Major League Baseball’s name change from Indians to the Guardians. The cartoon showed Vance in the uniform of the San Francisco Giants and saying, “The only Indians name change I support is my wife’s to ‘Senator J D Vance’s spouse.’”

Vance responded to this cartoon. “You’re making a racist joke about my wife, and no one is calling you out for it,” he said. “It’s disgusting and despicable, and it’s why nobody trusts the media.”

In the 2020 presidential race in the US, the couple came together on Newsmax, the channel which was to the right of Fox News. They sat together, her hand on his arm.

In Ohio, she first appeared on television alongside Vance when he won the first Republican primary. “​​Our family’s story is an Ohio story,” she said.

They were both lawyers, and she supported him in achieving a win in the Ohio senate elections by helping him garner the votes of Hindus from the area. Now, Vance has a good chance of becoming the vice-president with Trump’s approval rating at an all-time high after the failed assassination attempt on him.

“The JD that I met back when we were in law school is the JD that I’m sitting next to right now,” Vance told the anchor, highlighting how her husband hadn’t changed despite becoming a politician.

Earlier, Vance revealed he also found his faith because of his wife, Usha. He said his wife, a practising Hindu, helped him find his Christian faith.

Vance and Usha have three children together. Among the three is Vivek, a namesake of close friend and entrepreneur-politician Vivek Ramaswamy.

A family friend of the Chilukuris, Vikram Rao, told the NYT how by the age of five or six, Usha was displaying leadership traits.

“She decided which board games we were going to play and what the rules were going to be. She was never mean or unkind, but she was the boss,” said Rao, who works in the Silicon Valley.

Many say Usha had prepared all her life to succeed. She was the person prompting Vance. And with Vance ready to assume an important role, which could be a political springboard, her job has just begun.