Believe it or not, the Vances were introduced by Amy Chua, author of the controversial 2011 parenting book Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, who taught both Usha and J.D. at Yale Law School. Chua has described the couple as “extremely unlikely, almost opposites of personality,” while J.D. has referred to Usha as his “Yale spirit guide”—a reference to the help she gave him in navigating the unfamiliar terrain of their Ivy League alma mater. (J.D. described their dynamic in his 2016 memoir, Hillbilly Elegy; when it was adapted into a film by Ron Howard in 2020, Usha was portrayed by Freida Pinto.) The couple married in an interfaith ceremony in Kentucky in 2014.
Usha described her courtship with J.D. at the 2024 Republican National Convention, saying:
“I met J.D. in law school when he was fresh out of Ohio State, which he attended with the support of the GI Bill. We were friends first because, I mean, who wouldn’t want to be friends with J.D.? He was then, as now the most interesting person I knew, a working-class guy who had overcome childhood traumas that I could barely fathom to end up at Yale Law School, a tough marine who had served in Iraq, but whose idea of a good time was playing with puppies and watching the movie Babe. The most determined person I knew with one overriding ambition: to become a husband and a father, and to build the kind of tight-knit family that he had longed for as a child.”
She went on:
“When J.D. met me, he approached our differences with curiosity and enthusiasm. He wanted to know everything about me, where I came from, what my life had been like. Although he’s a meat-and-potatoes kind of guy, he adapted to my vegetarian diet and learned to cook food from my mother, Indian food. Before I knew it, he’d become an integral part of my family, a person I could not imagine living without.”
A registered Democrat in 2014, Usha voted in the Republican primary in 2022, when J.D. was running for Senate.
What has Usha Vance’s career trajectory been?
