Who is Usha Chilukuri, the wife of Trump’s vice presidential nominee JD Vance?
Usha Vance, 38, is “a member of the American elite who built herself from nothing, who started from scratch” to get to the top. Like her husband, a son of white, poor, rural America. The famous and for many unattainable American dream has thus a new incarnation. This is reported by Il Corriere della Sera, citing the New York Times. He is a lawyer specializing in corporate litigation for a prestigious (and liberal) law firm in San Francisco. He clerked for Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justice Brett M. Kavanaughwhen he was still a judge of the Court of Appeal.
Daughter of Indian immigrants, Usha Chilukuri grew up in a suburb of San Diego. According to childhood friends, she has always been a “leader”, a studious and quiet girl, a “bookworm”. Intelligent, ambitious and pragmaticwas registered as a Democrat in 2014. During her college years, she frequented mostly liberal circles. Her academic record would be the envy of anyone. After Yale, the future Mrs. Vance attended Cambridge University for a master’s degree in Philosophy, receiving the prestigious Gates Cambridge Scholarship.
Usha Chilukuri, the meeting with JD Vance
Usha Chilukuri and JD Vance met in Yale Law School (he described her as “his guiding spirit”). They got married in Kentucky in 2014.receiving Hindu blessings. They have three children: two sons, Ewan (6 years old) and Vivek (4), and a daughter, Mirabel (2 years old).
According to New York TimesUsha played a significant role in her husband’s political rise. At Yale, she helped Vance write down theories about social decline of rural white Americaideas that slowly gathered in her husband’s head and that flowed into his revelation book, the memoir that later became the manifesto of the American right Hillbilly Elegy (2016), translated in Italy by Garzanti with the title American Elegy (in 2020 it was adapted for the cinema by Ron Howard).
This is how Vance describes Usha Chilukuri in her autobiography: “As I began to think a little more seriously about my identity, I fell in love with a classmate of mine named Usha. By a lucky coincidence, we had been paired for the first major written exam, so in the first year we spent a lot of time together, getting to know each other well. He represented in my eyes a sort of genetic anomaly, a combination of all the positive qualities that a human being should possess: brilliant, hardworking, tall and beautiful“. And then: “I had had other girlfriends before. But with Usha it was a different story. I thought about her constantly. One friend called me ‘lovesick’ and another said he had never seen me like that.”
Thus began their love story, according to JD: “Towards the end of the first year I found out that Usha didn’t have a boyfriend and I invited to leave immediately. After a few weeks of courtship and only one date, I told her I was in love with her. It was against all the rules I had learned as a boy. But I didn’t give a damn”. Away from the spotlight, Usha Vance has always been lukewarm, at least until recently, on the possibility of her husband running for the second-highest office in the country: “I believe in JD and I really love him, we’ll see what happens in our lives.”
#Usha #Chilukuri #wife #Trumps #vice #presidential #nominee #Vance