Stepping up to the podium, Usha Chilukuri Vance looked out at the raucous crowd dressed in red, white and blue, bedazzled flags, wide-brim cowboy hats and sequined elephant earrings.
She smiled widely, if a little nervously.
It was her debut at the Republican National Convention. She admitted up front: When she was asked to introduce her husband, Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio, she had felt unsure of what to say.
“It occurred to me that there was only one thing to do — to explain from the heart why I love and admire J.D. and stand here beside him.”
The 38-year-old California native and daughter of Indian immigrants is not the most likely cheerleader for Donald Trump‘s MAGA movement, at least not on the surface.
She is a former Democrat who registered as a Republican just a few years ago. Politically reticent, she has spent years avoiding the rough-and-tumble of the culture wars.
A corporate lawyer, she has painstakingly amassed many of the elite academic and corporate credentials that tend to draw scorn from a new generation of GOP populists. Until this week — when her husband became Trump’s running mate — she worked as a litigator at a top-tier San Francisco law firm.
But Vance has clerked for famously conservative jurists — Supreme Court Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh when he served on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia.
In her new role of loyal MAGA wife and potential second lady of the United States, she steered clear of politics as she addressed the convention.
She launched into a sweet history of her courtship with the GOP firebrand who has assailed universities and Wall Street as the enemy, supported Trump’s unfounded claims of election fraud and said that deporting 20 million immigrants will lower home prices for Americans.
When she first encountered her future husband at Yale, she said, “he was then, as now, the most interesting person I knew.”
“A working-class guy who had overcome childhood trauma that I could barely fathom,” she added. “A tough Marine who had served in Iraq, but whose idea of a good time was to play with puppies and watching the movie ‘Babe.’”
Her husband, she said, was a “meat and potatoes” kind of guy who adapted to her vegetarian diet and learned to cook Indian food for her mother.
It was not exactly red meat for the base. But Republicans had plenty of that. Just before she spoke, Donald Trump Jr. had decried “Broke Bumbling Biden” and led the crowd to chant “Fight! Fight! Fight!”
That wasn’t her style. If Usha Vance has a role in the modern-day GOP, it is to present a softer version of Republicanism to Americans in battleground states who may be turned off by Trump’s divisiveness, authoritarianism and felony convictions.
So she presented their love affair as a modern all-American story of a blue-collar boy from a Rust Belt town in Ohio and an Indian American girl from suburban San Diego. “That J.D. and I can meet at all, let alone fall in love and marry is a testament to this great country,” she said.
The crowd cheered and clapped, but the applause was more muted than it was for Donald Trump Jr.
Still, GOP strategists said she had done her job.
“She did exactly what we knew she was able to do: She introduced her husband and she hit it out of the park,” said Jai Chabria, a friend, advisor and former strategist on J.D. Vance’s Senate campaign.
He praised her authenticity, noting she wrote her speech herself.
“She’s the secret weapon,” Chabria said. “Look, this is not the life that she craves, the political spotlight. But she is an unbelievable narrator for their life.”
A second-generation Indian, Usha Chilukuri grew up in the Rancho Peñasquitos suburb of northeastern San Diego, once solidly Republican territory that has become more liberal and diverse after waves of immigrants moved to the area and the biotech industry boomed.
She is the child of academics — her mother is a marine molecular biologist and provost at UC San Diego, her father an aerospace engineer and lecturer at San Diego State University.
She excelled at Mt. Carmel High School, and among her peers she developed a reputation as a fierce competitor.
“It’s not enough to know the answers, you have to do it fast,” a 17-year-old Usha told the San Diego Union-Tribune as she practiced for high school trivia championships.
She studied history at Yale, then traveled to England for a postgraduate scholarship at the University of Cambridge. Her study plan in early modern history was esoteric: She focused on John Field, a printer who operated between 1642 and 1668 in London and Cambridge, and investigated the development of copyright in 17th century England.
By the time she returned to Yale for law school and met James Hamel — the name J.D. Vance went by in college — she was adept at navigating an institution he barely understood.
“Usha was like my Yale spirit guide,” he wrote in his memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy.” “She instinctively understood the questions I didn’t even know to ask and she always encouraged me to seek opportunities that I didn’t know existed.”
He was smitten.
“She seemed some sort of genetic anomaly, a combination of every positive quality a human being should have: bright, hardworking, tall, and beautiful,” he wrote.
Usha Vance dispensed advice on how to hone his writing. She urged him to attend office hours and cultivate relationships with his professors, even advised him on how to use silverware at fancy corporate dinners.
Read more: Column: The GOP convention has been a split-screen experience, nasty and nice
Voter registration records document that Usha Vance was a registered Democrat in 2014, the year after she graduated. But in college, she was not overtly political.
“I have no memory of even one political conversation with Usha,” said Elliot Forhan, a Democratic state representative in Ohio who attended Yale Law School with the couple and took an antitrust class with her. “I remember she was very fashionable, but she didn’t show her cards as far as her political views.”
That was not unusual. A lot of Yale law students were cagey about making political remarks, Forhan said, fearing they might lose favor and a coveted judicial clerkship. But J.D. Vance was different. He openly espoused conservative beliefs and organized a reading group around the writings of Edmund Burke, the Anglo-Irish statesman and philosopher viewed as a founder of modern conservatism.
In 2013, they graduated. In 2014, they married and now have three children, Ewan, Vivek and Mirabel.
The Vances moved to the San Francisco Bay Area. J.D. worked in biotech while Usha became an associate at Munger, Tolles & Olson, one of the nation’s top corporate law firms that represents companies such as Airbnb, Meta, Google and Disney. The firm has been described by the American Lawyer as “radically progressive” and “a top contender in the cool, woke category” because of its diversity initiatives, generous parental leave and openness to remote work.
The Vances immersed themselves in San Francisco social life, volunteering at their local community garden and networking with lawyers and tech leaders. But they kept moving to advance their careers. In 2017 — the year she gave birth to their first child, Ewan — they moved to Washington so she could clerk for Roberts.
A year earlier, her husband had burst onto the national stage with “Hillbilly Elegy,” his breakout memoir that grappled with generational joblessness, opioid addiction and poverty in rural white America.
During this time, J.D. Vance came out as a Never Trumper. Writing in the Atlantic, he said Trump offered overly simple solutions for complex problems. “He never offers details for how these plans will work, because he can’t,” he wrote. “Trump’s promises are the needle in America’s collective vein.”
But J.D. Vance apologized to Trump when he ran for the Senate in 2022.
He backed Trump after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol — casting doubt on the 2020 election results and suggesting Vice President Mike Pence was wrong to refuse to certify Joe Biden’s victory — and he persuaded Trump to endorse him. He won and took office in January 2023.
Usha Vance rejects the idea that her husband betrayed his values or, as some critics allege, sold out to Trump. On the Milwaukee stage, she said: “The J.D. I knew then is the same J.D. you see today — except for the beard.”
But if the Ivy League lawyer celebrated for her probing analytic skills understood the thread running through J.D. Vance’s political journey, she did not try to explain it to the American people.
J.D. Vance’s goal as a VP candidate, she said, was the same as his goal as a husband and father: “to keep people safe, to create opportunities, to build a better life and to solve problems with an open mind.”
When her husband joined her on stage, she kissed him.
They exchanged a long embrace before the hall filled with the country twang of Merle Haggard’s “America First.”
She had done her job. She had humanized her husband. Then she stepped back into the wings.
This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
