How ‘spirit guide’ Usha Vance supported JD Vance’s meteoric rise

When JD Vance, an army veteran with a strong background in operations and a fraud case, entered Yale Law School, he may not have been seen as a person destined for a heart attack from the office of the US president.

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

By any measure, JD Vance, 40, has had a meteoric rise. In a matter of three years, he went from the longest running for 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.

At Yale Law School the two were friends at first. Although they shared a study group and social circle, their backgrounds could not have been more different.

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

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

Their different upbringings are what drew them to each other, Charles Tyler, a Yale classmate and friend of the couple, told the BBC.

“They have always been a very different people’s game,” he said.

In his 2016 bestseller, Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of Family and Tradition in Crisis, JD Vance recounts how his wife helped him adjust to life at an elite law school.

“I have never felt so inadequate in my entire life,” she wrote. “But I did it at Yale.”

The vice president-elect described one incident in the book where his wife taught him which part of the meal was official, so he could choose the silverware out.

“Usha was teaching JD about the ins and outs of being in high school,” Tyler recalled. “Usha was his guide throughout the process.”

The book explores his first-hand experience of rural poverty and addiction, while also providing glimpses into Vance’s relationships.

When JD Vance was revealed as Trump’s running mate in July, he had a limited name.

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

He was a high-powered attorney who clerked for Chief Justice John Roberts on the Supreme Court and appellate court judge Brett Kavanaugh, before being appointed by Trump to the nation’s highest court.

Usha Vance was a corporate attorney at the prestigious firm Munger, Tolles & Olson in San Francisco and Washington DC, before stepping aside to help her husband 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 comes out and gives a good speech, you advise him, give him his opinion, and then you are taken seriously,” said Chabria.

Since her husband became Trump’s partner, the mother of three has taken a behind-the-scenes role.

Friends say the avoidance of the limelight is partly due to his desire to protect their young children, aged seven, four and three.

During the campaign cycle, Usha gave several public speeches, including a sit-in interview with Fox News and introducing her husband at a party conference.

That speech gave the public perhaps the clearest understanding of their marriage.

“It is true that JD and I did not expect to find ourselves in this position,” he said.

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

“It feels more in line with who he is in life,” Tyler said.

In his speech, Americans learned that JD Vance learned to cook Indian dishes that complement his wife’s vegetarian diet, among other things.

And when it came time to protect her husband, she was ready to do that, too.

Last July, JD Vance’s previous comments in which he called Democratic politicians “childless girls” resurfaced on social media, and it was his damage control wife who seemed to do the most to quell the uproar.

She described his remarks as “ridiculous”, reframed them as reflecting the challenges facing working 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 does not agree with her husband on all political issues, although she said she never doubted his intentions.

“Usha has never been an overly political person,” JJ Snidow, a Yale Law School classmate of the two, told the BBC. “What America has seen of him as a sensational, unstable man is true – that’s what he is.”

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

“The reason many people have a hard time understanding his politics is not that he keeps his cards close to the vest,” he says, “it’s because he doesn’t align with many of the ethnic groups that identify with him.”

That will probably help her as the second lady of the US, a role that was erased from the history of Washington politics.

But with JD Vance’s star firmly on the rise, few who know the couple doubt that Usha Vance will continue to serve as his spiritual director in the White House and beyond.