Usha Vance is a private person in a very public job.
With her husband JD Vance’s rapid political elevation to President Donald Trump’s second-in-command, she stepped away from a successful legal career and into an unelected and ceremonial role that comes with no manual, an automatic global platform, and plenty of scrutiny from the American public and the media.
She faces her first test this weekend. After not speaking publicly or participating in any media interviews in the seven weeks of the Trump administration, Usha Vance is embarking on her first major solo trip as second lady, leading the US delegation to the Special Olympics World Winter Games in Turin, Italy, where she is joining athletes, coaches, families and fans in cheering on Team USA. She attended the opening ceremony on Saturday.
She’s already joined the vice president for a high-stakes trip to Europe, appearing by his side in France and Germany and joining him for meetings with French President Emmanuel Macron and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. And behind the scenes, a source familiar told CNN, the second lady is assembling a small team of staff, transitioning her three children to life at the Naval Observatory, and settling into the role, for which she will have her own platform and responsibilities.
What those will be, however, remains a mystery.
As the 39-year-old former Supreme Court clerk contemplates the platform and impact she hopes to have, Vance is described by people who know her as thoughtful, whip-smart, and decisive. She is also extremely guarded. CNN reached out to dozens of friends, colleagues, and family members; none agreed to speak on the record about her.
While JD Vance has emerged as the president’s attack dog — his interjections, for example, escalated Trump’s Oval Office showdown with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky — his wife has largely stayed under the radar.
But being a top figurehead in a new administration alongside first lady Melania Trump, who has taken her approach to the spousal role, is a delicate dynamic she’ll have to navigate.
Usha Vance has appeared with the first lady at major events such as the inauguration and the president’s address to Congress, but it is unclear whether they have substantively engaged, as Melania Trump spent four weeks away from Washington at the start of the new administration.
Asked by Fox News during the campaign whether she had spoken with the first lady about the role, Vance sidestepped the question, saying she had received advice “from various friends who found themselves unexpectedly in the spotlight, or, you know, honestly, just faced crises or other situations that changed their plans for their lives.”
Spokespeople for the first lady and second lady did not respond to CNN’s request for comment on their relationship.
Who is Usha Vance?
Vance is the youngest second lady to hold the role since the Truman administration and the first to raise school-age children at the Naval Observatory since the Clinton era.
Born and raised in San Diego by parents who emigrated from India, Vance is also the first person of color to be second lady.
“That JD and I could meet at all — let alone, fall in love and marry — is a testament to this great country,” she said in remarks to the Republican National Convention in July, saying that her husband “approached our differences with curiosity and enthusiasm.”
Vance attended Yale University, where she majored in history and spent her time outside the classroom tutoring local students, volunteering with the homeless, and studying ballet. She spent a year after graduation teaching in China, then earned a prestigious Gates Scholarship to Cambridge University to pursue a master’s in philosophy.
But it was back at Yale where she met JD Vance, a fellow law school classmate.
“We were friends first, because — I mean, who wouldn’t want to be friends with JD? He was then, as now, the most interesting person I knew. A working-class guy who had overcome childhood traumas that I could barely fathom,” she said during her RNC speech.
After their 2013 graduation, the Vances married in June 2014, and JD Vance’s bestselling memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy,” was published two years later.
Like her husband, Usha Vance appears to have made her political shift. According to public records, she was a registered Democrat from 2010 until 2014 but clerked for then-Judge Brett Kavanaugh of the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit from 2014 to 2015, and then for conservative Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts from 2017 to 2018.
Pressed on her husband’s previous comments disparaging Trump and asked how she felt about the GOP nominee during an August Fox News interview, Vance expressed muted support.
“If I didn’t feel that the ticket, the Trump-Vance ticket, was able to do some real good for the country, then I wouldn’t be here,” she told host Ainsley Earhardt.
In the Spotlight
When her husband was selected as Trump’s running mate, Vance resigned from her law firm, where she worked on complex civil litigation, and became a frequent presence at his side on the campaign trail. A noted bookworm, Vance was often observed with her latest read in hand, telling NBC News that she was reading the epic “The Iliad” to keep up with her oldest son, who was “obsessed with mythology.”
The Vances’ three small children, Ewan, 7, Vivek, 5, and Mirabel, 3, have also often been along for the ride, including on their February trip to Europe.
“Giving them a stable, normal, happy life and upbringing is something that is the most important thing to us,” Usha Vance told Earhardt during the campaign.
Vance has described her advisory role to her husband as the truth-teller.
“I just think he deserves to have someone in his life who hears it straight from him,” she said in the Fox News interview, later adding, “He treats everything I say with a lot of seriousness and respect. And that becomes a part of the way that he thinks about things.”
For his part, JD Vance credits his wife with encouraging his authenticity.
“The best advice she gave me when it came to politics is ‘Don’t let them filter you.’ And in politics, you know, you got consultants, and you got media professionals, you’ve got pollsters, you’ve got a lot of people who try to tell you what to say or how to behave or you know what to do. And Usha just said, ‘Just be yourself. Be authentic,’” he said during a recent appearance at the Conservative Political Action Conference.
Taking her advice, the vice president joked, has its limits.
“One piece of advice she gave me, like, a week ago, was ‘You should be nicer on social media.’ I don’t know that I’ll take that advice,” he said, laughing.
An ‘unnatural, natural relationship’
Usha Vance has yet to unveil any key priorities, and speaking to NBC News days before the election, offered scant clues about her interests or goals for her work as second lady.
“This is such an intense and busy experience that I have not given a ton of thought to my roles and responsibilities. It’s just something that I’ve never really — it’s not something I’m familiar with,” Vance told NBC at the time.
She continued, “And so I thought, what would I do? See what happens on November 5, and collect some information myself and take it from there. There are certainly things I’m interested in, but I don’t know how that all fits into this role.”
Her most recent predecessors have approached the amorphous role in different ways. As second lady, Jill Biden kept her job as a teacher but found ways to support education and military families, launching the “Joining Forces” initiative alongside then-first lady Michelle Obama.
Karen Pence took an active role in amplifying an initiative on art therapy and also continued to work, teaching elementary art at a nearby school.
Second gentleman Doug Emhoff made history as the first Jewish spouse of a president or vice president, finding his voice in the aftermath of the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel as he sought to speak out against rising antisemitism. During the presidential transition, Emhoff and Vance — both of whom left legal careers to support their spouses as vice president — spoke by phone for about 45 minutes.
Vance will also have to navigate the “unnatural, natural relationship” between first and second ladies, according to Kate Bennett, a former CNN journalist and author who has chronicled America’s first families.
“Presidents and vice presidents and first and second ladies are going to naturally be put together as a foursome — but it’s completely unnatural. The two spouses are different people with different backgrounds, and in some cases, don’t like each other,” Bennett said.
That was the case for Karen Pence and Melania Trump, Bennett reported in her 2019 biography of the first lady, “Free, Melania.”
“Karen Pence and Melania Trump never really got off on the right foot and stayed that way,” Bennett said.
The difficult dynamic between the two was on display as they traveled together. Pence was not invited to sit in the first lady’s cabin on her plane, seated instead with staff. And more recently, four years after Donald Trump’s supporters called for Mike Pence to be hanged at the US Capitol, Karen Pence kept her head down as both Trumps arrived at the funeral of former President Jimmy Carter, declining to exchange pleasantries.
Vance, Bennett said, “is very different from Melania Trump in terms of background, career and stage of life. It’s going to be interesting to watch how they work together.”
