There’s A Secret Yale Law Group Chat About The Vances Because Of Course There Is

window.cns = window.cns || {}; window.cns.pageContext = {“channel”:”news”,”content”:{“copyCount”:4852,”imageCount”:8,”embedCount”:19,”inline_embed_total”:27,”ratio”:179.7037037037037,”midContentCadence”:500,”adCount”:null},”contentType”:”article”,”experiments”:{“bucketLabel”:[],”experimentLabel”:[],”payload”:[]},”adsExperiments”:{“status”:200,”features”:{“paywall-gate”:{“defaultValue”:{}}},”experiments”:[],”dateUpdated”:”2026-07-01T10:32:04.264Z”},”functionalTags”:[“paywall-sample-for-0-days”],”keywords”:{“copilotid”:[“6a7b7e517a3c62ae4310ee5e”],”platform”:[“verso”],”tags”:[“news”,”politics”,”jd-vance”,”donald-trump”]},”targeting”:{“feature_flags”:[]},”server”:”production”,”slug”:”usha-vance-profile”,”subChannel”:”politics”,”subSubChannel”:””,”templateType”:”mt_article_two_column”};{“@context”:”http://schema.org”,”@type”:”NewsArticle”,”articleBody”:”JD Vance posted on X an announcement signed by both him and his wife. Usha reshared his post. Neither posted a photo. But Donald Trump did, early the following day, on Truth Social: The Vances’ son Vivek held the baby while his sister, Mirabel, looked on. The president and vice president claimed the moment; Usha receded into the background.nShe knows the drill by now. In Trump’s Washington, even your child’s first photo op runs through the boss.nOn April 23, about three months before Alec’s birth, Usha introduced Melania Trump at the 113th annual First Lady’s Luncheon, calling her a “woman of many accomplishments…and my friend.” When Melania walked to the podium, she barely acknowledged Usha, aside from giving a perfunctory “thank you” after the second lady turned the page of Melania’s speech. Usha stood by, beaming, her expression inscrutable.nIt’s a posture she has perfected: present, useful, and almost invisible. If she is at all disturbed by the nativist Republican Party her husband has come to represent, she never shows it, at least not publicly. Like many ambitious spouses of powerful politicians, Usha has learned to operate in private—a quiet architect content to let her husband stand in the light while she does the load-bearing work off camera.nMake no mistake: Usha Vance, like Melania Trump, is not a woman to be pitied. She has helped to build, carefully and mostly out of view, the JD Vance we know today. When I ask a friend of the Vances from Yale Law School whether they think Usha disapproves of her husband’s right-wing populism and social conservatism, they scoff. “It’s patronizing to say that she’s been silenced,” they say. “She has chosen this.”n“She built JD into this creation of the coastal Acela corridor. It’s not an immigrant story; it’s a meritocracy story,” another Yale Law classmate tells me, speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of retribution. “She radiates authority and a sense of purpose and mission.” Usha, says the Yale Law friend, “saw tremendous potential in JD.” Those in their Yale Law cohort have been so stunned by the Vances’ rapid ascent to the highest echelon of American politics—and their about-face on Trump and the MAGA movement—that they’ve created a Signal group where they feel they can safely compare notes. (Assuming nobody accidentally invites Jeffrey Goldberg to join the chat.)nUsha Chilukuri was born in 1986 to Indian Hindu immigrants and grew up in an upper-middle-class San Diego suburb with her younger sister, Shreya. The Vances often post photos of their children, but Usha’s parents and sister don’t appear in her social media feeds. They are very private people and very well educated. Usha’s sister graduated from Duke University in 2012 with a Bachelor of Science in engineering. Her father, Radhakrishna “Krish” Chilukuri, is a retired aerospace engineer who now lectures in the Department of Aerospace Engineering at San Diego State University. Her mother, Lakshmi, is a molecular biologist who serves as a provost at UC San Diego. She helped establish a pilot course on race, ethnicity, and gender in biology and medicine; has written about the university’s commitment to diversity; and once served on the school’s biological sciences diversity committee—her son-in-law, however, has made dismantling DEI and deriding “wokeness” a centerpiece of his political career.nWhen asked about the contradiction in 2025, as CBS News reported on his mother-in-law’s academic work, the vice president offered a version of a family détente: “I don’t like DEI, and I’m proud of what our administration has done on that front,” he said. “But I love my mother-in-law. If she doesn’t share my views on DEI, I suppose I’ll have to do what 99% of Americans do when confronted with a family member who doesn’t always agree with them: get over it.”nUsha, who declined an interview for this story, was comfortable operating in the exclusive world of elite academic institutions well before she met her husband—and it seems she has always enjoyed a challenge. In 2006, when she was a junior at Yale—nearly two decades before she became second lady in a Republican administration—the irreverent (and more than a little dated) campus tabloid Rumpus featured her as one of the college’s “50 most beautiful” students. A photo caption described her smile as being “as bright as the San Diego sun,” while an article deemed her politics to be “of the leftish political persuasion.” Her taste in men, the item noted, ran in the other direction: “She does like a man who has a lot to say for himself. In the past, most of her liaisons have been tall, handsome, and conservative.”nShe graduated summa cum laude from Yale in 2007 with a degree in history, then earned a master’s degree from Cambridge before enrolling at Yale Law. Usha and JD met in 2010 during their first year of law school. The vice president later recalled his first impression of his future wife, characterizing her as “a combination of every positive quality a human being should have: bright, hardworking, tall, and beautiful.” They became friends immediately, but it wasn’t until their second semester—when he began opening up to her about being raised by his grandparents in a working-class town in Ohio and having a strained relationship with his mother, who struggled with addiction—that he won her over. Usha told Meghan McCain in an interview last year that she came to think of him as one of “the more interesting people I’d ever met in my life.” By their third year, they were living together with their beloved German shepherd, Casper.nUsha’s political views were, even then, difficult to read. Classmates tell me she rarely gossiped and seldom voiced strong opinions. “It was never about anything other than achievement,” one says. “She was the quintessential, ubiquitous Yale Law student whom I like to call a ‘gold star chaser.’ Usha took it to the next level. I never understood why she was trying so hard.” The couple had celebrity status on campus and earned their own nickname: Judusha, a mash-up of JD, Usha, and “judicial.”nUsha became something like JD’s spirit guide to elite institutional life, coaching him on the unspoken rules he hadn’t grown up with. In his best-selling 2016 memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, JD recalls her teaching him which utensils to use at a formal dinner—go from the outside in—and according to friends, she once kept a spreadsheet of things she thought he should try, like Greek yogurt. Just as he made a career of translating the white working class for coastal elites, she introduced him to the customs of the top 5 percent.nThe Vances, per The New York Times, had a civil wedding in Kentucky in 2014 and then a separate Hindu ceremony. Both went on to build the kind of résumé their Yale classmates would covet for themselves. Usha clerked for a series of Republican-appointed judges, including US District Court judge Amul Thapar in eastern Kentucky and Judge Brett Kavanaugh on the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit.nHer affection for Kavanaugh would later resurface as one explanation for the broader rightward drift in her own politics. Usha was reportedly appalled by how the future Supreme Court justice was treated during his contentious 2018 confirmation hearings, after psychology professor Christine Blasey Ford accused him of sexually assaulting her decades earlier, which he denied. That isn’t to say that Usha always agreed with her husband’s politics: A friend, according to The Washington Post, said she was disturbed by Trump’s incitement of the January 6 riot. (The second lady’s office did not respond to a request for comment.) A year later, her husband sharply criticized the congressional investigation into the insurrection. JD, who was running for Senate at the time, went so far as to say that the probe was creating an environment that would make “Americans enemies of the state in their own country.”nJD has since defended Trump’s conduct in the run-up to and during the Capitol attack; criticized his predecessor Mike Pence for how he handled certifying the 2020 election results; and, in an interview with CNN’s Kaitlan Collins, cast doubt on whether Pence’s life was ever truly in danger that day.nThrough it all, she’s been described by friends and her own husband as a moderating force. “Even at my best,” JD writes in Hillbilly Elegy, “I’m a delayed explosion—I can be defused, but only with skill and precision. It’s not just that I’ve learned to control myself, but that Usha has learned how to manage me.” Ken Blackwell, Ohio’s secretary of state from 1999 to 2007 and a current senior fellow at the conservative Christian Family Research Council, has visited the Vances at their home in Cincinnati and describes the couple as having “distinctly different carriages of their personhood. Usha comes from a family that pays attention to small things and detail. JD is, at times, a bigger-picture guy and is likely to have a higher risk orientation than Usha, but they balance each other out well.” He adds: “She has a quiet confidence that exhibits itself in understated ways. When she’s made a decision, you come away knowing that she’s thought it through.”nMuch has been made of JD’s political evolution from Hillbilly Elegy–era media darling and outspoken Never Trumper to one of the president’s most reliable defenders. His original memoir was once embraced by progressives who saw him as a translator for the Rust Belt voters who helped Trump get elected the first time. JD seemed as surprised as anyone by Trump’s 2016 win: In the run-up to that election, he called Trump “reprehensible” and an “idiot,” and told one former roommate he thought Trump could be “America’s Hitler.” Over time, though, JD became one of the president’s most outspoken supporters. In 2022, backed by billionaire Peter Thiel and endorsed by Trump in the Republican primary, he ran for US Senate in Ohio and won. That is when he started making obvious moves to curry Trump’s favor, like questioning the congressional investigation into January 6.nUsha’s own reported change of heart is harder to pin down. A woman shaped by elite, diversity-minded institutions, Usha is not backing MAGA without reservations, but she is firmly in her husband’s corner—and after the president himself, JD is the most visible supporter of the MAGA movement, as well as one of its most vocal adherents. This March, in an NBC News interview promoting her childhood-literacy podcast, Storytime With the Second Lady, Usha told correspondent Kate Snow about working with her husband: “There are conversations all the time…. When something is troubling him, that’s when I come into the picture.” She also acknowledged that she doesn’t always agree with the vice president or the administration’s policies, but she said that no one in her political orbit had ever taken her to task for it.nFor a couple that models an easy domestic partnership, it was notable when, on a Father’s Day podcast episode released in June, JD joined Usha as a guest to read Winnie-the-Pooh and greeted his wife on camera with two brisk pats on her knee. The interaction went viral for how stilted it looked, prompting one commentator to crack that there was more visible chemistry during the Iran negotiations. Usha declined to respond to the hubbub, a nonreaction that was itself the point: However she felt about being patted like a child, she let the moment pass without comment.nIn a political culture where image is everything, Usha’s unfussy presentation reads as a quiet rejection of the performative style associated with other women around Trump—something that may or may not be intentional, but that lands as a message all the same.nDuring the campaign, Usha helped prepare her husband for his vice presidential debate and became one of his most effective defenders. When JD faced backlash for a 2021 Tucker Carlson interview in which he said the country was being run by “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives,” Usha pushed back on the framing: “I took a moment to look and actually see what he had said and try to understand what the context was,” she said. “Because what he was really saying is that it can be really hard to be a parent in this country. And sometimes our policies are designed in a way that makes it even harder.”nShe also endured racist attacks over her Indian heritage. After Trump chose JD as his running mate, white nationalist Nick Fuentes questioned how JD could “support white identity” while having an Indian wife. In an August 2024 interview on ABC News’ This Week, JD responded: “Look, my attitude to these people attacking my wife is, she’s beautiful, she’s smart. What kind of man marries Usha? A very smart man and a very lucky man, importantly…. Don’t attack my wife. She’s out of your league.”nSome 14 years after they’d met as unlikely equals at Yale, “out of your league” landed as more than a talking point.nBut this is not a woman who enters into anything blindly. She is, at 40, the youngest second lady since the Truman administration, as well as the first woman of color, the first Indian American, and the first Hindu to hold the role—an office that’s rather thinly defined. (Its acronym, SLOTUS, doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue.) When JD became vice president, they already had three children, all under the age of 10.nThe family manages to live a semiprivate life, which is possible in part because of where they live. The vice president’s residence sits on the grounds of the US Naval Observatory, in a leafy pocket of northwest Washington—less than three miles from the White House, but a world away in spirit. “I would always say that people would forget about us because we were a little island away from 1600 [Pennsylvania Avenue]. It was the best of both worlds,” Elizondo says of his years with the Bidens. “They would go to the White House, and they would come home, and they would be able to go sit out on their porch and have a glass of wine and not have people at the gate looking at them. I think the Vances must find that to be very comforting, especially with young kids. There’s plenty of space for extended family.”nUsha tries to lead as normal a life as she can—taking exercise classes, making Costco runs with the kids to stock their lunch boxes, and participating in a book club. She also plays four square and does recess duty at her son’s Catholic school in Bethesda, Maryland, where the Secret Service maintains a presence.nSome parents were worried that the Secret Service would attract attention; having the second family at the school “challenged professionalism and Catholicism,” as one school administrator tells me, “but everyone has risen to the challenge.” Even those who don’t agree politically with the vice president and second lady manage to separate the personal from the political. “Some parents are excited to see the Vances at back-to-school night,” says the administrator. “Others are like, ‘Whatever.’” There has been a sense of relief, they add, that “no one has acted like a fool.”nMost second ladies can live in relative obscurity if they choose to, but the Vances run the risk of causing a scene whenever they venture out. (Kamala Harris won DC by 92.5% in 2024.) Yet Usha’s steady confidence makes it seem as though she is prepared for anything—the product of a mindset she built well before four children entered the picture. One Yale Law classmate, Peter Hamilton, who spoke to The Washington Post, remembered visiting Usha’s room while she was part of a prestigious teaching program in China and finding hundreds of color-coded Post-it notes breaking her days into 15- and 30-minute increments. She has sometimes still run on that system. When Meghan McCain asked last year how she handled raising three young children, Usha said: “When they were little, we tried to think of life in almost like 15-minute blocks—what can we do with Vivek [the middle child] for 15 minutes before he then starts trying to tear apart the furniture? What can we do for the next 15 minutes?”nRegardless of party, the vice president and their spouse usually share an instinct for their place in the political pecking order. The second lady isn’t expected to weigh in on day-to-day affairs, and getting out ahead of one’s skis is a risk no SLOTUS wants to take, especially in a White House where any hint of overshadowing the president—particularly a president singularly focused on dominating every news cycle—is frowned upon.nUsha is adept at seeming uninterested in a future inside the White House. She told McCain that she missed the house the Vances bought in Cincinnati, and when McCain asked about her potentially becoming first lady, Usha demurred: “In a dream world, eventually I’ll be able to live in my home and kind of continue my career and all those sorts of things. And if that happens in four years, I understand. If that happens at some other point in the future, I understand. [I’m] just sort of along for the ride and enjoying it while I can.”nWhen NBC’s Kate Snow asked Usha last March whether she felt comfortable in MAGA world, Usha tilted her head and answered with a question of her own—“What do you mean?”—without disputing the question’s premise. “No one has ever asked me to engage in any kind of litmus test on anything,” she said. “I don’t feel like I have to walk around pretending anything of any sort. Sometimes I have thoughts that fit very comfortably into one side or another; sometimes I have views that are way more idiosyncratic. It’s a world that I think is actually rather accepting of that, since everyone knows that I really care greatly about JD’s success.” When Snow asked her about MAGA hats, she was similarly unbothered: “I don’t really own any hats. I think I have a Disneyland hat, I want to say. Not a hat lady.”nAnita McBride, who served as chief of staff to first lady Laura Bush, credits Usha with correctly reading the assignment. “It’s not easy to be spouse of the VP—that’s not new. Whether you have kids or not, you don’t want to overstep any boundaries with the White House,” McBride says. By building her public role around childhood literacy, Usha, in McBride’s view, has made a wise decision “to advocate for something that any mother cares about.”nThat platform hasn’t shielded her from Washington’s uglier rituals. In February 2025, Trump removed half of The Kennedy Center’s board of trustees, named himself chairman, and replaced those ousted with allies, including Usha. The following month, the Vances were met with about 30 seconds of boos when they took their seats at The Kennedy Center for a National Symphony Orchestra performance. As the onslaught crested, JD waved and smiled; Usha stayed seated beside him, her focus calm and straight ahead. The two remained at the venue for the entire show.nElizabeth Haenle, who served as social secretary to Vice President Dick Cheney and managed the vice presidential residence, says that Usha is navigating her position—as the first nonwhite second lady in a movement often associated with nativism—through subtlety rather than silence. “She’s got a platform whether she likes it or not,” Haenle says, pointing to the Vances’ visit last year to the Taj Mahal in Agra, India, during a four-day tour. “When she puts her family in front of the Taj Mahal in traditional clothing, that sends a message.”nThat hope, and Usha’s role in his religious life more broadly, form a through line in JD’s second memoir, Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith, published by Harper in June as a follow-up to Hillbilly Elegy. The book traces his 2019 conversion to Catholicism and recounts an April 2025 trip to the Vatican, where the vice president, as he writes, found officials reluctant to say anything substantive about immigration beyond “platitudes” and “clichés” about treating migrants humanely; his audience with Pope Francis, whose health was already failing, came the day before the pope died.nUsha appears throughout the book as both witness and quiet skeptic. JD describes an epiphany he had in a cathedral in Burgundy, France, while vacationing with Usha and their young child. The realization that Catholicism was for him arrived, fittingly, during the brief period when his wife stepped away to use the restroom. Elsewhere, he writes in praise of her: “Usha is so humble and delicate that you don’t realize 99 percent of the time that she is a fierce intellect and extremely tough.” In one passage, after Usha recommends that he read Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking because she “found it to be cathartic,” JD says goodnight, then looks up the word cathartic in the dictionary and reports the definition back to his readers.nThe book is dedicated to Usha, who remains Hindu and has not converted—even as, according to her husband, she is often the one making sure that their children are well-behaved at Sunday Mass. She once told him: “Therapy didn’t work for you, but church does.”nJD has shown a similar reluctance to draw lines when defending his family from his movement’s fringes. At Turning Point USA’s annual convention in December 2025, amid a bitter internal debate over whether the right should platform figures like the antisemitic podcaster Nick Fuentes—the same person who previously attacked Usha over her race—the vice president came down firmly against “purity tests.” “I didn’t bring a list of conservatives to denounce or to deplatform,” he said in his closing speech, adding that the movement should welcome anyone who loves America, “white or black, rich or poor, young or old, rural or urban, controversial or a little bit boring, or somewhere in between.” Erika Kirk, who took over Turning Point after her husband Charlie’s assassination and has floated JD as a possible successor to Trump, endorsed the approach.nOne of the Vances’ Yale Law classmates offers a read on the calculation behind the statement. “Usha must have been okay with it. JD is an old-fashioned man who wants to protect his family, and unless she went along with it, he never would have not defended her. He is quick to anger and he’s very loyal. The choice not to criticize Nick Fuentes and people like him in the Republican Party—that is a choice.”nAs JD has ascended, Usha has made real sacrifices: giving up a legal career, absorbing racist attacks, and dealing with threats to her family’s safety, including a planned attack against Trump and his top officials during the White House Correspondents’ Dinner on April 25. Whether her personal beliefs fully align with her husband’s, or with those of the party he now represents, may matter less than it once would have. As Ken Blackwell puts it to me, unprompted, in a follow-up call after we’ve spoken about Usha’s history as a registered Democrat: “I was thinking about what you said. You mentioned her being a Democrat. Well…so was Trump!”nTheir new arrival is one reason the Vances have been retreating from Washington more than ever. As they settle into life as a family of six, the Vances—similarly to Jack and Jackie Kennedy before them—are renting property in Middleburg, Virginia, roughly 40 miles from Washington. They are leasing part of a sprawling, historic country estate known as Wolver Hill Farm from a firm led by Chuck Kuhn, whose moving company has ushered several presidents into and out of the White House. Their primary home remains their residence at the Naval Observatory, and JD is expected to join his family in Middleburg only occasionally; his attorney has said the vice president will pay fair market rent. The Secret Service has reportedly been assigned to protect the family in Virginia horse country as well.nFor now, it seems Usha is still taking life in 15-minute increments—at least until 2027, when her husband, should he choose to run, could begin ramping up a campaign for president. If that day comes, Blackwell expects Usha to follow Barbara Bush’s playbook rather than invent her own. “Barbara Bush wasn’t a movement conservative, but she was a person of great dignity and carriage, and I think that’s the way Usha would be,” he says. Like Usha, Bush was known to keep her own counsel—she was privately pro-choice, but rarely said so in public. 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Somewhere out there is a Signal group full of Yale Law graduates, and they are still talking about law school — or at least some of their classmates.

That’s the detail that launched a thousand social media posts from Kate Andersen Brower’s new Vanity Fair profile of the second lady, Usha Vance. The Vances’ former Yale Law classmates have set up a private Signal group where they “safely compare notes” about the couple’s improbable rise to MAGA royalty. The profile even lands the obligatory punchline — assuming nobody accidentally adds Jeffrey Goldberg.

It is, frankly, perfect. Yale Law School has always run like the elite prep school in a CW drama: a small, incestuous, credential-obsessed universe where everyone knows everyone, proximity is currency, and the whisper network never sleeps. The Signal group is just Gossip Girl for people who bill in six-minute increments. The classmates even had a nickname for the couple — “Judusha,” a mash-up of JD, Usha, and “judicial.” This needs to be studied as the pinnacle of what the kids are calling cringe these days.

And the group chat has THOUGHTS on Usha’s role in MAGAland. It’s “patronizing to say that she’s been silenced,” one friend tells Brower. “She has chosen this.” All those brilliant people, years later, still trying to reverse-engineer a classmate they once sat next to in Contracts, as if Usha Vance were some enigma, and not the fully legible product of the Yale Law machine they’d all passed through. And that machine has a central figure that also played a key role in the rise of the house of Vance, Amy Chua.

The notorious Tiger Mom was reportedly sought out by both Vances. The professor was known for taking ambitious, immigrant-background students under her wing. It paid off, spectacularly. Chua was the self-described “authorial godmother” of Hillbilly Elegy: the person who read the opening pages JD emailed her, told him to write the book, and handed him her own literary agent. He thanked her by name in the acknowledgments. And Usha, for her part, landed the clerkships that cement elite legal careers — Brett Kavanaugh on the D.C. Circuit, and then Chief Justice John Roberts at the Supreme Court.

Chua wasn’t just a mentor, she was a member of the Yale Law clerkship committee, and in 2018 she became the story herself, when it emerged that she’d allegedly been coaching women students on how to present themselves for their Kavanaugh interviews — telling them it was “no accident” the judge’s female clerks “looked like models.” Her husband, professor Jed Rubenfeld, was under investigation at the school at the same time, and had reportedly warned a student to avoid clerking for exactly two judges: Alex Kozinski and Brett Kavanaugh.

You may recall Kozinski retired abruptly, days after his clerks began resigning, as at least 15 women, many of them former clerks, came forward describing problematic behavior that had been whispered about him for years. And Kavanaugh, who clerked for Kozinski and stayed close to him for years, never squarely accounted for what he knew. Small wonder Yale students walked out, calling their own school a “model of complicity.”

And during the controversial SCOTUS confirmation process for Kavanaugh, Chua’s response was to defend Kavanaugh in a Wall Street Journal op-ed, hailing him as an extraordinary mentor to women on the strength of glowing emails from 10 former clerks. A year later, her own daughter clerked for Kavanaugh at the Supreme Court, an outcome we could all see coming.

This is the machine that produced Usha Vance. And here’s where Brower’s profile gets quietly devastating.

Because one of the explanations it offers for Usha’s far-rightward turn is that she was reportedly appalled by how Kavanaugh, her old boss, was treated during his 2018 confirmation. A woman who clerked for Kavanaugh, mentored by the professor who spent years grooming clerks for Kavanaugh, radicalized by watching Kavanaugh get Kavanaughed. It is the most Yale Law villain origin story imaginable. The elite institution doesn’t just hand you the credential. It hands you your grievances, too.

Earlier:Yale Prof Promotes Brett Kavanaugh’s ‘Extraordinary’ Ability To Hire Her Daughter
Details On The Allegations Against, And Yale Law School Investigation Into, Professor Jed Rubenfeld
Yale Law Students Protest, Referring To School As ‘Model Of Complicity’ When It Comes To Sexual Harassment
Supreme Court Clerk Hiring Watch: The Return Of The Tiger Cub Kavanaugh’s Clerkship Quid Pro Quo Continues