How Usha Vance helped “spirit guide” JD Vance’s meteoric rise

When JD Vance, a military veteran with a tough working-class background and a case of impostor syndrome, entered Yale Law School, he may not have thought he was destined to take a beating from the US presidency.

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

Regardless, 40-year-old JD Vance has had a meteoric rise. After three years, he has gone from a long career in the Senate to the third youngest vice president in American history.

By his side every step of the way has been his ‘spirit guide’, as he calls her – wife, Usha.

The pair were friends at Yale Law School early on. Although they shared a reading group and a social circle, their backgrounds could not have been more different.

Usha Vance, the 39-year-old daughter of Indian immigrants, grew up in the suburbs of San Diego before attending Yale for undergraduate and graduate studies.

Her husband grew up in Middleton, Ohio, born into a family with roots in the impoverished Appalachians of eastern Kentucky.

Their contrasting upbringings drew them together, Charles Tyler, a Yale classmate and friend of the couple, told the BBC.

“It was always a very different game,” he said.

In his 2016 memoir Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis, JD Vance recounted how his wife helped him adjust to life at a top law school.

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

In the book, the vice president described how his wife taught him which part of a formal meal to use the silverware for, from the outside to the inside.

“Usha was teaching JD about the subtle aspects of being in an elite institution,” Tyler recalls. “Usha was his guide throughout the process.”

The book is a first-hand account of the poverty and subjugation of a rural class, while offering a glimpse into the relationship between the Vancets.

When JD Vance ran as Trump’s running mate in July, he had limited name recognition.

He was a junior senator from Ohio, elected to public office for the first time two years earlier, after being a marine, lawyer and venture capitalist.

He was an accomplished lawyer who clerked for Supreme Court Justice John Roberts and Chief Justice Brett Kavanaugh before Trump appointed him to the nation’s highest court.

Usha Vance was a corporate litigator at the prestigious San Francisco and Washington DC firm Munger, Tolles & Olson before her husband left to run for vice president.

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

“When he goes out and gives a great speech, he advises him and gives him his opinion, and he’s taken seriously,” Chabria said.

Since her husband became Trump’s running mate, the mother of three has taken a backseat role.

Friends say she shuns the limelight in part because she wants to protect her young children, ages seven, four and three.

During the campaign cycle, Usha made public statements a few times, including when she sat down for an interview on Fox News and to introduce her husband at the party conference.

That speech offered the audience perhaps the clearest insight into their marriage.

“It’s safe to say that neither JD nor I expected to find ourselves in this position,” he said.

At that address, Tyler said, he was like the friend he still talks to every week.

“It’s very consistent with the person in life,” Tyler said.

From his speech, the Americans discovered that JD Vance had learned to cook Indian dishes that fit his wife’s vegetarian diet, among other things.

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

Last July, JD Vance’s earlier comments in which he called some Democratic politicians “childless cat ladies” resurfaced on social media, and it was his wife who did the damage control to quell the ensuing uproar.

She described his remarks as “chilling,” reframing them as reflections on the challenges facing working-class families in America, and expressed a desire for critics to look at the larger context of what her husband said.

She admitted in the Fox interview that she doesn’t agree with her husband on every political issue, though she said she never questioned his intentions.

“Usha has never been an overly political person,” the pair’s former Yale Law School classmate JJ Snidow told the BBC. “What America has seen of him as a very reserved and reserved person is real; that’s who he is.”

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

“The reason so many people have difficulty characterizing his politics is not because he keeps his cards close to the vest,” he says, “but because he doesn’t fit the ideological tribes that most of us have identified.”

That will likely serve as the second lady of the US, a role that has historically been removed from the cutting edge of Washington’s partisan politics.

But with JD Vance’s star firmly on the rise, few who know the couple doubt that Usha Vance will serve as his “spirit guide” in and out of the White House.