Meet Usha Chilukuri, the Indian-origin wife of Republican JD Vance who could be US Vice President

The current Vice President of the US is, of course Kamala Harris, the daughter of cancer researcher Shyamala Gopalan who was originally from Chennai, and Stanford economist Donald Harris, who was originally from Jamaica.

But first, who is JD Vance, who was chosen by Donald J Trump as running mate at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee late on Monday (July 15) night (India time)?

Yale graduate, venture capitalist: Who is JD Vance?

Vance grew up in humble surroundings in Middletown, Ohio. After completing high school, he enlisted with the US marines where he served in the Iraq War as a combat journalist and a public relations officer.

Following military service, he earned an undergraduate degree in political science and philosophy from Ohio State University. He then went on to study law at the prestigious Yale Law School, where he was an editor of the Yale Law Journal.

After graduating from Yale in 2013, he practiced law for a brief while before moving to San Francisco to work in the tech industry as a venture capitalist. Notably, he worked at PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel’s Mithril Capital.

A best-selling author, he was earlier a vociferous Trump critic

Vance rose to fame on the back of his best-selling book Hillbilly Elegy, which was published in 2016. In the year Trump romped to power for the first time, many saw Vance’s autobiographical Hillbilly Elegy as a window into rural, oft-forgotten America that fuelled his rise.

A review in The New York Times called Vance’s book “a compassionate, discerning sociological analysis of the white underclass that has helped drive the politics of rebellion, particularly the ascent of Donald J Trump”. A feature-length film based on the book was released in 2020.

At the time, Vance was staunchly anti-Trump. “I’m a Never Trump guy,” he told talk show host Charlie Rose in October 2016. In an op-ed for The Atlantic in July 2016, Vance wrote: “Trump is cultural heroin… Trump’s promises are the needle in America’s collective vein… He makes some feel better for a bit. But he cannot fix what ails them, and one day they’ll realise it”.

In a private Facebook message to a friend in 2016, Vance wrote: “I go back and forth between thinking Trump is a cynical asshole like [Richard] Nixon who wouldn’t be that bad (and might even prove useful) or that he’s America’s Hitler”.

From ‘Never Trump’ to die-hard loyalist

Vance’s opinions on Trump, however, are very different at present. He reportedly voted for Trump in 2020, and in 2022, won his maiden senatorial race with the help of Trump’s backing.

Vance has “explained his ideological shifts as a result of a twofold intellectual awakening: It turned out that Donald Trump wasn’t as bad as Vance had thought, and that American liberals were much worse,” The NYT wrote, post Vance’s selection as Trump’s running mate.

In an interview with The NYT in June, Vance had said: “I allowed myself to focus so much on the stylistic element of Trump that I completely ignored the way in which he substantively was offering something very different on foreign policy, on trade, on immigration”.

Vance today is one of the most dogged Trump defenders, many of whose opinions reflect those of the former president. He has also emerged as “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”, according to Politico.

Married to Usha Chilukuri, a lawyer he met at Yale

Vance met Usha Chilukuri Vance during his time in Yale. The couple have three children together. Vance is Catholic, while Usha is Hindu. The family lives in Cincinnati, Ohio.

Usha Chilukuri grew up in a suburb of San Diego, with a reputation of being both a “leader” and a “bookworm” among her friends from childhood and adolescence. The NYT described her in an article as “brainy, ambitious and pragmatic”. After four years at Yale, she moved to Cambridge on a Gates Fellowship where, according to The NYT, she moved in “mostly liberal and left-wing circles”.

According to American media reports, Usha was a registered Democrat as of 2014, but has not been vocal about her political views in recent years. From 2015 onward, Usha worked at Munger, Tolles, and Olson, a law firm that describes its corporate culture as “radically progressive”, and whose hiring practices have been categorised as “cool” and “woke”. SFGate, a Bay Area publication, reported that Usha had resigned from her job “just minutes” after Trump chose her husband as his running mate for the November election.

SFGate quoted from Usha’s bio to say that her practice at the law firm mainly dealt with “complex litigation and appeals in a wide variety of sectors, including higher education, local government, entertainment, and technology, including semiconductors”.

She also clerked for US Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, and Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, when he was a judge at the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit. She also clerked for Amul Thapar, now a judge for the US Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, when he served in the US District Court for the Eastern District of Kentucky, SFGate said, quoting from Usha’s bio.

At Yale, she was an editor for Yale Law Journal and the Yale Journal of Law & Technology.

Import of Vance’s selection by Trump

In a post on his social media platform Truth Social, announcing the appointment, Trump said 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.” Several of these Midwestern states are likely to play a critical role in November’s election.

According to experts, picking Vance is likely to energise Trump’s loyal base, with the Senator one of the most popular fixtures in conservative media. It is also likely to play out well in the Silicon Valley, where Trump is looking for financial backing for the campaign. Peter Thiel, the billionaire former CEO of PayPal, is one of Vance’s biggest donors.

However, the pick also means that two white men will now lead the Republican ticket, as Trump seeks to make inroads into other demographics. “A staunch conservative from a Republican state, Vance is unlikely to bring many new voters into Trump’s corner, and may even alienate some moderates,” Reuters reported.

Some Trump backers wanted him to select a woman of colour to expand his coalition’s reach. It will be interesting to see if this factor comes into play if by some chance President Joe Biden, who is under tremendous pressure from large Democratic donors and many Democratic politicians to step aside, does make way for Harris.