How 'Spirit Guide' Usha Vance Guided JD Vance's Meteoric Rise

When J.D. Vance, a hard-working, working-class military veteran with impostor syndrome, entered Yale Law School, he might not have looked like someone destined to get a glimpse of the presidency in just over a decade. USA.

Many of those who know him attribute his remarkable success story to the influence of his wife, Usha Vance, whom he met on an Ivy League campus.

By any measure, 40-year-old JD Vance has had a meteoric rise. Within three years, he had risen from a longtime candidate for the United States Senate to becoming the third youngest vice president in American history.

At every step of his way is his “spiritual guide”, as he calls her – wife Usha.

At Yale Law School, the two were friends at first. Although they shared a reading group 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 her undergraduate and graduate degrees.

Her husband grew up in Middleton, Ohio, born to a family with roots in the poor Appalachians of 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've always been a match of many different people,” he said.

In his 2016 bestseller the memoir Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis, JD Vance tells how his wife helped him adjust to life at a top law school.

“I have never felt out of place in my entire life,” he wrote. “But I did it at Yale.”

The vice president-elect describes one instance in the book in which his wife taught him which cutlery to use for which part of a formal meal, choosing the silverware from the outside in.

“Usha taught JD about the finer points of being at an elite institution,” Tyler recalls. “Usha was his guide throughout the process.”

The book explores his first-hand experience of the poverty and addiction of a rural underclass, while also offering insight into Vance's relationships.

When JD Vance was introduced as Trump's challenger in July, his name had limited recognition.

He was the junior senator from Ohio, elected to public office for the first time just two years earlier, after stints as a Marine, lawyer and venture capitalist.

She was a highly experienced attorney who clerked for Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts and Court of Appeals Judge Brett Kavanaugh before he was appointed by Trump to the nation's highest court.

Usha Vance was a corporate litigator at the prestigious San Francisco and Washington firm Munger, Tolles & Olson before stepping down to help her husband run for vice president.

The couple is “a team in every sense of the word,” Jai Chhabria, a family friend and political consultant, told USA Today.

“When he comes out and gives a great speech, she advises him and gives him her opinion and it's taken seriously,” Chabria said.

Since her husband became Trump's running mate, the mother of three has taken 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 election cycle, Usha made public remarks several times, including when she sat down for an interview with Fox News and to introduce her husband at the party conference.

This 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 most like the friend he still talks to every week.

“I feel extremely in tune with who I am in life,” Tyler said.

From her speech, Americans learned that JD Vance had learned how to cook Indian dishes that, among other things, accommodated his wife's vegetarian diet.

And when it came time to protect her man, she was ready to do that too.

Last July, JD Vance's previous comments in which he called some Democratic politicians “childless cat ladies” resurfaced on social media, and it was his wife whose damage control appeared to do the most to drowned out the noise that followed.

She described his remarks as a “joke,” reframed them as a reflection on the challenges facing working families in America, and wished critics would look at the larger context of what her husband said.

In the Fox interview, she admitted that she did not agree with her husband on all political matters, although she said that she never doubted his intention.

“Usha was never an overly political person,” JJ Snidow, a former classmate of the two at Yale Law School, told the BBC. “What America sees in her as a very impressive, reserved person is real – 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 that 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 identify with .”

That will likely serve her well as America's second lady, a role that has historically been removed from the cutting edge 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.