When JD Vance, an Army veteran with a hard-working background and a case of impostor syndrome, entered Yale Law School, he may not have seemed like someone destined to become president of the United States within a little more than a decade.
Many of those who know him attribute his extraordinary 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 just three years, he went from a feature candidate for the US Senate to the third youngest vice president in American history.
His “spiritual guide”, as he calls her – his wife, Usha, was by his side every step of the way.
At Yale Law School, the pair were friends at first. Although they shared a readership and social circle, their backgrounds could not have been more different.
Usha Vance, the 39-year-old daughter of Indian immigrants, grew up in suburban San Diego before attending Yale for undergraduate and graduate studies.
Her husband grew up in Middleton, Ohio, born into a poor Appalachian family in eastern Kentucky.
Their contrasting upbringings are what drew them to each other, Charles Tyler, a Yale classmate and friend of the couple, told the BBC.
“They were always an amalgamation of very different people,” he said.
In his bestselling 2016 memoir, Hillbilly Elegy: 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 life,” he wrote. “But I am at Yale.”
The newly elected vice president described one instance in the book in which his wife taught him which cutlery to use for which part of a formal meal, how to choose silverware from the outside in.
“Usha coached JD on the finer points of being at an elite institution,” Tyler recalls. “Usha was his guide through the whole process.”
The book explores his first-hand experience of the poverty and dependency of the rural underclass while offering insight into the Vances’ relationship.
When JD Vance was introduced as Trump’s running mate in July, his name had limited exposure.
He was the junior senator from Ohio, first elected to public office just two years earlier, after being a Marine, a lawyer and a venture capitalist.
She was a highly successful attorney who clerked for Chief Justice John Roberts on the Supreme Court and for Court of Appeals Judge Brett Kavanaugh, before Trump appointed him to the nation’s highest court.
Usha Vance was a corporate litigator at the prestigious Munger, Tolles & Olson firm in San Francisco and Washington, DC, before stepping down 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 goes out and gives a great speech, she advises him and gives him her opinion, and that’s taken seriously,” Chabria said.
Since her husband became Trump’s running mate, the mother of three has embraced a behind-the-scenes role.
Friends say she shuns the limelight in part because she wants to protect their young children, ages seven, four and three.
During the campaign cycle, Usha made several public remarks, including when she sat down for an interview with Fox News and to introduce her husband at a party conference.
That speech offered the public perhaps the clearest insight into their marriage.
“It’s safe to say that neither JD nor I expected to find ourselves in this position,” she said.
In that address, Tyler said, she was the most like the friend she still talks to every week.
“It’s a great fit for a person who’s in life,” Tyler said.
From her speech, the Americans discovered that JD Vance learned to cook Indian dishes that, among other things, adapted to his wife’s vegetarian diet.
And when it came time to defend her husband, she was ready to do so.
Last July, JD Vance’s previous comments calling some Democratic politicians “childless cat ladies” resurfaced on social media, and it appears his wife did the most damage control to quell the ensuing riot.
She described his remarks as a “joke,” reframing them as a reflection on the challenges facing working-class families in America, and expressed a desire for critics to see the larger context of what her husband said.
In an interview with Fox, she admitted that she does not agree with her husband on all political issues, although she said that she never doubted his intentions.
“Usha was never a very political person,” JJ Snidow, their former classmate at Yale Law School, told the BBC. “What America saw her as a very impressive, reserved person is really – that’s who she is.”
Charles Tyler says Usha Vance doesn’t fit neatly into any political box.
“The reason so many people have difficulty characterizing her politics is not because she keeps her cards close to the vest,” he says, “but because she doesn’t conform to the kind of ideological tribes that most of us have identified with.”
That will likely serve her well as America’s second lady, a role that has historically been removed from the cut and thrust of Washington’s partisan politics.
But with JD Vance’s star firmly on the rise, few who know the power couple doubt that Usha Vance will continue to serve as his spiritual guide, perhaps even one day as First Lady of the United States.
