Former President Donald Trump revealed on Monday at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, that his vice presidential pick is Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH), but who is his wife, Usha Chilukuri Vance?
J.D. Vance, 39, has served as a U.S. senator for Ohio since 2023. Vance is the author of the memoir Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis. His memoir is also a film, which is currently on Netflix.
Chilukuri, the daughter of Indian immigrants, was raised in San Diego, California, and met Vance while they were both students at Yale Law School, according to the New York Times.
According to her LinkedIn page, she served as a law clerk for the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Kentucky from 2013 to 2014. From 2014 to 2015, she served as a law clerk for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.
Most recently, she has worked as an associate for Munger, Tolles & Olson LLP from January 2019 to the present.
The Times notes that Vance and Chilukuri had “decided to organize a discussion group on the subject of ‘social decline in white America'”:
One of them was J.D. Vance, currently the Republican candidate in Ohio for a U.S. Senate seat.
For him, the subject matter was intensely personal:: He had grown up in an economically depressed area of Ohio, and was raised in large part by his grandparents as his mother struggled with addiction.
He had lived the material.
The other student behind the project was Usha Chilukuri, the child of Indian immigrants, from an ethnically diverse San Diego suburb. For her, white social decline may have been an intellectual interest – but it was one with special significance. She was then Mr. Vance’s girlfriend, now his wife, known as Usha Vance.
Since getting married in 2014, the couple has welcomed three children: Ewan, Vivek, and Mirabel, according to People.
The outlet noted that her biography on Munger, Tolles & Olson, which is unavailable, stated that she had “participated in the Supreme Court Advocacy Clinic, the Media Freedom and Information Access Clinic and the Iraqi Refugee Assistance Project during her time at Yale.”
Axios reported that Chilukuri had also previously clerked for Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh while he served on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.
