What JD Vance’s wife Usha REALLY told a friend about Trump and the incident she found ‘deeply disturbing’

JD Vance’s wife was so appalled by Donald Trump and the Capitol riots on January 6 that her friends were shocked to see her supporting him for president.

Usha Chilukuri Vance introduced her husband as Trump’s running mate with a passionate speech, but before that she rarely expressed a political opinion.

They could only remember a moment when Ms. Vance, a successful Yale-educated lawyer and the daughter of Indian immigrants, watched the riots at the Capitol with horror and disgust.

She was particularly angry with Trump himself, whom she blamed for inciting the riot by delivering an inflammatory speech just minutes earlier.

Just three years later, 38-year-old Vance sat next to Trump at the Republican National Convention last week as a potential future Second Lady.

“Usha found the breach of the Capitol and Trump’s role in it deeply disturbing,” a friend recalled to the Washington Post.

“She was generally appalled by Trump from the moment he was first elected… It was surreal to see her sitting next to him last night.”

Unlike that day, however, her husband did not express outrage. Instead, he called the detained rioters “political prisoners” and supported Trump’s false claim that the election was rigged.

Mrs Vance’s entire life leading up to her speech at the convention seems to be out of step with the situation she is currently in.

Her father is an engineer and her mother is a microbiologist. Both are Hindus who emigrated from India and now live in San Diego, where they teach at universities.

After a quick course of study at Yale University, a teaching stay in China and a master’s degree at the University of Cambridge, she came to Yale Law School in 2010.

She is described as having “never gotten a B in her life” and is known for her fanatical organization, organizing her life into 15- to 30-minute intervals with color-coded Post-It notes on her wall.

Ms. Vance poked fun at herself in a 2012 Facebook post, sharing a Slate article and asking, “What type of Muppet are you, chaos or order?”

“I think there is no doubt that I am an Order Muppet,” she wrote in the entry, which was obtained by The Washington Post.

But she was also “a nice, humble friend who had no trouble building bridges between seemingly different social groups,” said her law school classmate James Eimers.

She once even bought a table she didn’t need, only for a friend to drive a pickup truck to pick it up for her and talk to the saleswoman, a girl he had a crush on.

She met Vance at a freshman event at Yale Law School and the two quickly became inseparable.

Everyone who knew her agreed that Vance’s relationship with his future wife gave his career a tremendous boost and gave him the drive and skills he needed to succeed.

“When I get a little too cocky or too proud, I just remind myself that she has accomplished so much more than I have,” he told Megyn Kelly in a 2020 podcast interview.

“I’m one of those guys who really enjoys having a powerful female voice over my left shoulder saying, ‘Don’t do this, do that.'”

In her senior year, her classmates called her “Judusha,” a portmanteau in the style of celebrity couples like Brangelina.

“Although he is a meat and potatoes guy, he has adapted to my vegetarian diet and learned to cook Indian food from my mother,” Ms. Vance said in her speech at the convention.

“Before I knew it, he was an integral part of my family, a person I couldn’t imagine life without.”

After graduating, Ms. Vance climbed the career ladder and began working for District Judge Amul Thapar in Eastern Kentucky.

She then joined Judge Brett Kavanaugh on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit and Chief Justice John Roberts on the Supreme Court.

They married in Kentucky in 2014. Guests sat on wooden chairs on the grass and were blessed by a Hindu pandit in a separate ceremony.

The couple moved to San Francisco in 2015, where Mr. Vance worked for conservative venture capitalist Peter Thiel at his investment firm Mithril Capital.

Ms. Vance was a partner at Munger, Tolles & Olson, where she practiced civil litigation for clients including Disney. Her colleagues remembered her as a moderate personality.

Named a “top contender in the ‘cool, woke’ category” by American Lawyer in 2019, the firm touts its DEI credentials and welcoming attitude toward “intersex, transgender, nonbinary, and gender nonconforming people” on its website.

Everyone who spoke to the media about her, during her studies and her career as a lawyer, and among her friends emphasized that she kept her political views to herself.

She seemed moderate, apolitical and more interested in the technical aspects of her work and studies.

In an August 2012 Facebook post, she expressed her admiration for Bill Clinton while driving across the country with Mr. Vance the summer before her senior year.

“Driving through Arkansas and listening to Bill Clinton tell us about his life. Best road trip ever,” she wrote.

Mr. Vance rose to fame with the publication of his memoirs, “Hillbilly Elegy,” in which he recounts his hard-hitting childhood in rural Ohio and Kentucky.

However, he was far from the fiery conservative he was as Trump’s running mate. Rather, he was considered a center-right representative and was good at explaining white working-class views to liberals.

Following the book’s success, Mrs. Vance published numerous interviews with her husband, including an article in the Atlantic in which he sharply criticized Trump.

He compared Trump to “cultural heroin. He makes some people feel better for a while. But he can’t cure what’s wrong with them, and one day they’ll realize it.”

Mrs Vance shared the article on Facebook, pointing out that her husband had “taken a strong stance against Trump.”

During these years, Mr. Vance was one of Trump’s harshest critics, even comparing him to Hitler and saying that anyone who “voted for him is an idiot.”

However, this began to change when Mr. Vance began his campaign for the Senate in the 2022 midterm elections.

In his public statements, he tended to the right, railing against “far-left gender ideology,” “woke DEI,” and other favorite targets of Trump.

Although he owes his lifestyle to the elite institutions where he was accepted on scholarship, in November 2021 he gave a speech at the National Conservatism Conference titled “The Universities Are the Enemy.”

Mrs Vance was not heavily involved in the campaign as she had just given birth to her third child, but appeared in an ad praising him as an “incredible father” and “my best friend”.

“She doesn’t crave the political spotlight, but she was very involved in the campaign,” Jai Chabria, a Republican strategist who worked on Vance’s campaign, told the Washington Post.

After Mr. Vance’s election, the couple split their time between their $1.4 million home in the East Walnut Hills neighborhood of Cincinnati and a $1.6 million home in Del Ray in Alexandria, Virginia, when they were in Washington, DC for Congress.

In both cases, these are wealthy neighborhoods with predominantly Democratic voting populations that are miles away from where Mr. Vance was raised.

Then, on the day of the party’s convention last week, Mrs. Vance quit her job at Munger, Tolles & Olson – and surrendered to the role of politician’s wife despite her incredible talents.

She explained at the time that she did it “to focus on taking care of our family.”

Many of her friends are shocked that Mrs. Vance actively supports Trump and her husband in their inflammatory statements.

“Am I surprised to see her there to support a man who seems to be increasing his political power by putting down transgender people and immigrants? Yes, that part surprised me,” said Chad Callaghan, a former college friend.

Chabria stressed that Mrs. Vance’s political views have simply evolved over the past few years, just as her husband has evolved from critic to running mate.

“Usha has undergone a similar change of heart and fully supports Donald Trump and her husband. She will do everything she can to ensure her victory in November,” he said.