By Helen Coster
MILWAUKEE (Reuters) - Usha Vance, the wife of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s newly-selected running mate J.D. Vance, made her debut on the national political stage when she introduced her husband at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee.
Vance presented her 39-year-old husband as a “working class guy” who had overcome childhood traumas to attend Yale Law School. She described him as “a tough Marine who served in Iraq but whose idea of a good time was playing with puppies and watching the movie 'Babe.'"
She compared her middle-class upbringing in San Diego to his experience growing up poor in Appalachia.
“That J.D. and I could meet at all, let alone fall in love and marry is a testament to this great country," Vance, 38, said. "It is also a testament to J.D.”
A litigator with degrees from Yale and Cambridge, Usha Vance held judicial clerkships and worked in private practice before announcing on Monday that she is resigning from her law firm, Munger, Tolles & Olson, to support her family during the campaign. The Vances have three children.
Usha and J.D. Vance met at Yale Law School, graduating in 2013. Usha Vance served as an editor of the Yale Law Journal and managing editor of the Yale Journal of Law & Technology and participated in classes offering free legal advice on Supreme Court and media freedom issues.
She was a law clerk to Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts during the 2017-2018 term, when she helped research cases and write drafts of decisions.
Roberts during that term authored a 5-4 ruling upholding Trump's travel ban targeting several Muslim-majority countries. In another ruling, Roberts was in the 7-2 majority that backed a Christian baker who refused to make a wedding cake for a gay couple.
Usha Vance earlier was a law clerk in Kentucky for now-6th U.S. Circuit Judge Amul Thapar, who Trump once considered for a Supreme Court vacancy. In 2014, she clerked on the D.C. Circuit for Brett Kavanaugh, who was nominated by Trump and confirmed to the Supreme Court in 2018.
The daughter of Indian immigrants, Vance has been the target of racist attacks on the social media platform X since Monday’s announcement.
Stew Peters, a far-right internet personality, posted a photo of the couple and wrote: “There is an obvious Indian coup taking place in the U.S. right before our eyes.”
Vance said in a June television interview that she was raised in a religious household. Her parents are Hindu.
In that interview she described her husband’s Senate bid in Ohio as a shock. “It was so different from anything we’ve done before," she told “Fox and Friends.” "But it was an adventure.”
J.D. Vance, author of the bestselling memoir "Hillbilly Elegy," was elected in 2022.
In a 2017 NBC interview when she was 37 weeks pregnant with the couple’s first child, Vance described liking that her then-friend J.D. was “very diligent” when they were assigned to work together on a brief in law school. “He would show up for these 9 a.m. appointments that I set for us to work on the brief together,” she said.
“The thing I remember about Usha is how completely forward and confident with herself she was,” J.D. Vance said in that interview. At the convention on Wednesday, he called her "an incredible lawyer and a better mom."