President-elect Donald Trump and his family won’t be the only ones thrust into the spotlight after he and running mate Vice President-elect JD Vance are sworn in on Monday. Usha Vance, soon-to-be second lady, will also be along for the ride.
Before American businessman and former President Trump takes his oath of office at noon ET on Inauguration Day, Vance will step onto the inaugural platform and do the same, according to the Joint Congressional Committee on Inaugural Ceremonies.
Usha Vance and the couple’s three children will be among those in attendance at the swearing-in ceremony in Washington, D.C.
While the title of second lady is more of a ceremonial role, it’s likely Usha Vance will continue to offer her husband unwavering support as he steps into this new role.
In JD Vance’s 2016 memoir “Hillbilly Elegy,” the former Ohio senator described his wife as his “spirit guide” who bailed him out at a fancy dinner by secretly advising him on the right cutlery to use and reminded him that “every perceived slight is not cause for a blood feud.”
Who is Usha Vance? Here’s what to know about JD Vance’s wife and the former corporate litigator as the family joins Trump at the White House.
See Usha Vance through the years:Lawyer, mother, second lady
Usha Chilukuri, 38, was born and raised in San Diego as the child of Hindu Indian immigrants. Both parents are educators with her father being an engineer and lecturer at San Diego State University while her mother Lakshmi Chilukuri is a provost for School of Biological Sciences at the University of California, San Diego.
Her younger sister is a mechanical engineer at a San Diego-based semiconductor company, according to Reuters, and her aunt is a medical professional in the eastern India city of Chennai.
Before Usha Vance hit the campaign trail with her husband, she worked at Munger, Tolles & Olson, a law firm that specializes in litigation, corporate, professional liability, employment, financial restructuring, tax and executive compensation. She left the firm when JD Vance secured the vice-presidential nomination.
Usha met JD while they were both students at Yale Law School, where she was one of the top students.
They were assigned as partners for their first major writing assignment: “She seemed some sort of genetic anomaly, a combination of every positive quality a human being should have: bright, hardworking, tall, and beautiful,” JD Vance wrote in his memoir.
Before attending law school, Usha Vance received an undergraduate degree from Yale University and later completed a Master of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge, after having received the Gates Cambridge Scholarship, TIME reported.
Usha Vance, who was a registered Democrat until 2014, clerked for conservative judges including, US Supreme Court Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., and Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh when he was an appeals court judge, after she graduated from law school in 2013.
The couple was married a year later.
Usha and JD share three children: Ewan Blaine, 7, Vivek, 4, and Mirabel Rose, 3.
In a June 2024 interview with Fox News, Usha Vance shared that she grew up in a religious household but was not raised Christian and is not Christian.
“My parents are Hindu and that was one of the things that made them such good parents, that make them really, very good people,” she told Fox News. “And so, I think I’ve seen that, the power of that in my own life.”
The Vance family, per tradition, will move from their home in Cincinnati’s East Walnut Hills neighborhood to the grounds of the United States Naval Observatory after the inauguration festivities are complete.
Vice Presidents and their families have lived in a white nineteenth-century house located at Number One Observatory Circle, a couple miles away from the White House, since 1977. It has since been home to the families of Vice Presidents Bush, Quayle, Gore, Cheney, Biden, and Pence, according to the White House.
Contributing: Swapna Venugopal Ramaswamy, USA TODAY; Cheryl McCloud, USA Today Network-Florida; Haley BeMiller and Chad Murphy; Cincinnati Enquirer
