JD Vance's Wife Seen as a 'Political Cipher'

Donald Trump's selection of JD Vance as his running mate has brought attention to Vance's wife, Usha, as well. Some highlights of bios moving about the 38-year-old attorney:

• Leery: In an interview with Fox News last month when her husband was on the short list, Usha Vance talked about the potential changes. "I'm not raring to change anything about our lives right now, but I believe in JD and I really love him, and so we'll just sort of see what happens." She added, "I don't know that anyone is ever ready for that kind of scrutiny."

• Early life: Born Usha Chilukuri, she grew up in suburban San Diego as the daughter of Indian immigrants, per the Daily Beast. Her father is an engineer and her mother a biologist. She left in 2013 for Yale, where she met her future husband.
• Yale: At the Ivy League school, she "instinctively understood the questions I didn't even know to ask, and she always encouraged me to seek opportunities that I didn't know existed," the Ohio senator wrote in his Hillbilly Elegy memoir, per CNN. She got her bachelor's in history from Yale and a master's in philosophy from Cambridge before going on to Yale Law School.
• Career: Usha Vance clerked for Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts as well for Justice Brett Kavanaugh before he was on the Supreme Court. She started with the prestigious firm of Munger, Tolles & Olson in 2015, which describes its own corporate culture as "radically progressive," per the New York Times. She remained there until her resignation this week.

• Politics: The Times describes Usha Vance, who was a registered Democrat until 2014, as "something of a political cipher." Her senator-husband has railed against "woke" culture, once trying to ferret out whether State Department nominees were too "radical" for their potential jobs, notes Politico. Meanwhile, the hiring practices of her longtime employer were described as being in the "cool, woke category" by the journal American Lawyer.
• Family: She and JD Vance married in Kentucky in 2014 in an interfaith ceremony—he converted to Catholicism in 2019 and her family is Hindu—and they have three children.

(More JD Vance stories.)