Chants of “J.D.” filled the venue of the Republican National Convention on Monday, after Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) made his first public appearance since being announced as former President and Republican nominee Donald Trump’s vice presidential pick, Politico reported.
A Trump convert, Vance was once one of Trump’s most caustic critics in 2016, going so far as to muse that the former president could be “America’s Hitler,” USA Today wrote.
So, how did Vance escalate to where he is now? He attributed much of his career trajectory to the guidance of his Indian American wife, Usha Chilukuri Vance, according to The New York Times.
Growing up in San Diego to Indian immigrant parents, Usha Vance went on to pursue a star-studded academic and employment record. She earned her bachelor’s and law degrees from Yale University and her master’s from the University of Cambridge, according to Axios.
In her legal career, she clerked for U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh while he was on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. She also defended large institutions and corporations like the University of California, as well as the Walt Disney Company.
While Axios and some other news outlets cite that the law firm she worked for until recently, Munger, Tolles & Olson LLP, was “radically progressive,” the article it references seems to be referring mostly to its flexible employment policies regarding parental leave and remote work, not the firm’s views in the cases it defends.
After her husband received the nomination, Usha Vance reportedly quit from the law firm, despite reportedly not “raring” to become the nation’s potential Second Lady, Axios wrote.
But what Usha Vance’s place as potentially the first Asian American Second Lady is to be determined. One user on social media platform X criticized her, calling Usha Vance “the latest Indian American woman delighted to do the bidding of white supremacy.”
Others have praised the Vances, as another X user labeled their interracial, interfaith family “quintessentially American.”
Still others have directed racist insults at Usha Vance and her family. In response to the “quintessentially American” comment, one user wrote, “Race mixing is gross,” and another criticized Usha Vance’s prior registration as a Democrat, making the discriminatory claim that “Indians indeed have no morality — just goals.”
J.D. Vance has previously called out racist vitriol aimed at his wife, such as an incident in 2022 when The Plain Dealer published a political cartoon joking about Usha Vance’s ethnicity, according to The New York Times. The cartoon — which came out shortly after Ohio’s Major League Baseball team, the Cleveland Indians, changed its name to the Cleveland Guardians to avoid the racial stereotyping of Indigenous people — depicted J.D. Vance saying that “the only Indian name change (he supports) is (his) wife’s to ‘Senator J.D. Vance’s spouse,” The New York Times wrote.
“You’re making a racist joke about my wife, and no one is calling them out for it,” he said. “It’s disgusting and despicable, and it’s why nobody trusts the media.”
In an interview with Fox News’ Sean Hannity on Tuesday, J.D. Vance addressed issues facing his reputation and stances but concluded that he is “still a husband and a dad first.”
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