News Brief
Trump's VP Pick J D Vance Has An India Connection — His Wife Usha Chilukuri
J D Vance with his wife Usha
Former US president Donald Trump on Monday (15 July) announced that Ohio Senator J D Vance will be running as his Vice-President in the upcoming 2024 Presidential elections.
Trump announced 39-year-old Vance as his vice presidential pick, rewarding a one-time harsh critic who has evolved into one of his most steadfast and uncompromising supporters in Congress.
Vance is married to Usha Chilukuri, a San Francisco corporate litigator whose parents are Indian Hindus.
Raised in a San Diego suburb, Usha Chilukuri moved from an extracurricular-studded four years at Yale to a Gates Fellowship at Cambridge, where she moved in mostly liberal and left-wing circles.
As of 2014, she was a registered Democrat.
Usha's academic achievements include serving as Managing Editor of the Yale Journal of Law & Technology and Executive Development Editor of The Yale Law Journal, according to a biography from Munger, Tolles & Olson law firm.
She and Vance met at Yale Law School, and the pair were married in Kentucky in 2014, and blessed by a Hindu pundit in a separate ceremony, according to New York Times.
Vance has played a quiet but significant role in her husband’s rise. At Yale, she helped Vance organise his ideas about social decline in rural white America, which formed the basis of his best-selling memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, which was adapted into a film directed by Ron Howard in 2020.
In the past, she has made some rare appearances with Vance as he sought the Ohio Senate seat.
In an interview taken three weeks before Trump announcing Vance as his VP pick, Usha Chilukuri Vance and her Senator husband talked about the couple having different faiths, and what are their views on the speculations of him becoming a pick for the US Vice President.
"I don't think people understand how hard he works and how creative he is. Everything he says and does is built on a foundation of so much thought. He's always trying to do better," Usha said.
On being asked about the reason behind her support for J D Vance, as the US Presidential elections remain around the corner, Usha told Fox, "There are a few different reasons...One is that I grew up in a religious household. My parents are Hindu, and that was one of the things that made them such good parents, that makes them really very good people. And so I think I've seen that...the power of that in my own life, and I knew that JD was searching for something. This just felt right for him."
