No one is unaware today that Donald Trump often sees women as nothing more than pleasant "sidekicks" standing silently on their husbands' arms. During his victory speech in Florida following his reelection on November 5, the husband of the statuesque Melania known for his many sexist remarks, didn't fail to draw applause on stage for the physique of Usha Vance, the "absolutely remarkable and beautiful wife" of his Vice President-elect, JD Vance.
At 38, Usha is about to become one of the youngest second ladies of the United States and the first Indian-American to occupy this role. For a long time, however, she shone solely on her intellectual merits as a highly educated lawyer with a reputation for progressivism who ended up embracing her husband's conservative trajectory.
The first meeting between Usha Chilukuri (her birth name) and JD Vance took place in the fall of 2010, at the prestigious Yale Law School in Connecticut. The students, only two years apart, found themselves working in the same group on "social decline in White America."
At first glance, they have little in common. He's an Iraq war veteran, the child of a poor and dysfunctional Scottish-Irish family from Ohio, raised by his grandparents. She is the daughter of immigrants from southern India who grew up with her microbiologist mother and engineer father in the suburbs of San Diego, California.
In a magazine put together by Yale students and unearthed by the New York Times, Usha Chilukuri is ranked among the university's "50 most beautiful students." In a short description dedicated to her, she is characterized as being "of the leftish persuasion," with a preference for men of the opposite political persuasion. "In the past, most of her liaisons have been tall, handsome and conservative," noted the article, which praised her "smile as bright as the San Diego sun." Vance and Chilukuri soon formed an inseparable bond, to the point that their classmates nicknamed them "Judusha," a contraction of "JD" and "Usha." Usha is "a combination of every positive quality a human should have – bright, hardworking, tall, and beautiful," JD would write about her in Hillbilly Elegy (2016), to explain his love at first sight.
They were married in Kentucky in 2014, with two separate ceremonies organized. Vance, a later-in-life Catholic convert, who was baptized in 2019, agreed to receive the blessing of a Brahmin while dressed in traditional Hindu garb. The following year, they moved to San Francisco, California. Usha, also a Cambridge graduate, then worked for the law firm Munger, Tolles & Olson, reputedly close to the Democrats, where her colleagues remember her as a "cool" and "woke" woman, again according to the New York Times.
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