How ‘Spirit Guide’ Usha Vance Supported JD Vance’s Rapid Rise

When J.D. Vance, a military veteran with a tough working-class background and a case of imposter syndrome, entered Yale Law School, he may not have seemed like the man destined to capture the heart of the President of the United States.

Many who know him attribute his incredible success story to the influence of his wife, Usha Vance, whom he met on an Ivy League campus.

By all accounts, JD Vance, 40, has had a meteoric rise. In three years, he became the third youngest vice president in U.S. history to run for Senate.

By his side every step of the way was his “soul guide.” He calls her Usha, his wife.

The two were initially friends at Yale Law School. Although they shared a book club and club, their backgrounds couldn’t be more different.

The daughter of Indian immigrants, 39-year-old Usha Vance grew up in suburban San Diego and earned both her undergraduate and graduate degrees from Yale University.

Her husband grew up in Middleton, Ohio, and came from a family with roots in the poor Appalachians of eastern Kentucky.

Charles Tyler, a Yale classmate and friend of the couple, told the BBC that their contrasting upbringings attracted them to each other.

“They have always been a unity of very different people,” he said.

In his best-selling 2016 memoir, Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis, J.D. Vance described how his wife helped him adjust to life at a top law school.

“I have never felt out of place in my entire life,” he wrote. “But I did that at Yale.”

The vice president-elect described in the book how his wife taught him which cutlery to use for which part of a formal meal and how to pick up silverware outside.

“Usha was teaching JD about the nuances of working at an elite institution,” Tyler recalls. “Usha was his guide throughout the process.”

The book provides a glimpse into Vances’ relationships while exploring his first-hand experiences with poverty and addiction among the rural lower classes.

When J.D. Vance was revealed as Trump’s running mate last July, his name received limited recognition.

He was a junior senator from Ohio who was first elected to public office just two years ago after working as a Marine, lawyer and venture capitalist.

She was a highly accomplished lawyer who clerked for Chief Justice John Roberts and Appeals Court Judge Brett Kavanaugh before being appointed to the nation’s highest court by President Trump.

Usha Vance worked as a corporate litigator at Munger, Tolles & Olson, a prominent firm in San Francisco and Washington, D.C., before stepping down to help her husband run for vice president.

Jai Chabria, a family friend and political consultant, told USA Today that the couple is “a team in every sense of the word.”

“When he goes out and gives a great speech, she advises him, gives him her opinion and takes it seriously,” Chabria said.

The mother of three has taken on a behind-the-scenes role since her husband became Trump’s running mate.

Friends say she avoids the limelight because she wants to protect her young children, aged seven, four and three.

During the campaign, Usha made several public speeches, including when she appeared in a Fox News interview and when she introduced her husband at a party conference.

That speech probably gave the public the clearest insight into their marriage.

“It’s no exaggeration to say that neither JD nor I ever expected to be in this position,” she said.

Tyler said that at that address she most resembled a friend with whom he still spoke weekly.

“It feels very consistent with the person in your life,” Tyler said.

From her speech, Americans discovered that JD Vance learned, among other things, how to cook Indian dishes to suit his wife’s vegetarian diet.

And when the time came to defend her husband, she was ready to do so.

JD Vance’s previous comments from July, in which he called some Democratic politicians ‘childless cat ladies’, resurfaced on social media, and it was his wife who played the biggest role in quelling the ensuing uproar.

She described his comments as “funny remarks,” reframed them as a reflection on the challenges facing America’s working families, and expressed hope that critics would look at the larger context of what her husband said.

She said in the Fox interview that she never doubted her husband’s intentions, but acknowledged that she disagrees with him on all political issues.

“Usha has never been an overly political person,” JJ Snidow, a former classmate of both men at Yale Law School, told the BBC. “The reality is that America found her to be a very impressionable and reserved person. That’s who she is.”

Charles Tyler says Usha Vance doesn’t fit neatly into any political mold.

“The reason many people have a hard time characterizing her politics is not because she keeps her cards close to the vest, but because she doesn’t conform to the ideological tribes with which most of us identify.”

That will probably serve her well as the second wife of the United States, a role historically removed from Washington’s partisan politics.

But with J.D. Vance’s star firmly on the rise, few people know the couple who doubt that Usha Vance will continue to serve as his “spiritual guide” in the White House and beyond.