On the tarmac at a bustling central Florida airport in late September, Vance stood for a moment in the fresh air, balancing a hardback copy of Anthony Doerr as her husband finished a conference call rather than getting into an SUV in an empty motorcade nearby. Cloud Cuckoo Land” on his left arm as the wind and nearby engine fans curled the corners of the pages. No battlefield-bunker flight was too short or too full a campaign day for Vance to travel without a book in hand. They provided a repeated, if fleeting, ritual glimpse into the potential second lady’s aloof persona.
Although a fixture on the campaign trail, Vance did not take a public role going forward like other political spouses. Since introducing her husband at the Republican convention, she hasn’t made a public statement at a campaign event, instead more behind the scenes role, including helping to advise him as he prepares for the vice presidential debates.
“Obviously, I was asked to present JD at the convention, and it was an active role,” Vance said. “But what JD is asking, and what I’m definitely willing to do, is to keep him company,” she said, adding that the relentless campaign travel can be a distraction.
“I think it makes him more motivated to do that,” Vance continued, “to be together, to have someone to talk to, and someone who’s totally unrelated to you, or maybe talking to you. How a certain rally went or a certain set of questions and or get my perspective on such things, but from my perspective as his wife and best friend, as opposed to the perspective other people on the plane might give.”
If the former president Donald Trump if re-elected, Usha Vance would be the youngest second lady since the mid-20th century at age 38, leaping into a role where her predecessors were active in supporting White House-backed policy initiatives. First Lady Jill Biden has been involved in education initiatives and partnered with former First Lady Michelle Obama on programs to support military families. Doug Emhoff is the country’s first second gentleman as the vice president’s husband Kamala HarrisHe helped to prepare the first National Strategy for Combating Anti-Semitism. Lynne Cheney, former chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities, children’s books and participated with then first lady Laura Bush on some programming around education and literacy.
“You know, it’s been such an intense and busy experience that I haven’t given a ton of thought to my roles and responsibilities. It’s just something I’ve never seen — it’s not something I’m very familiar with,” Vance said of what she would see as a potential second lady. he talked about the work he would think about.
“And I thought, what am I going to do? See what happened on November 5th and gather some information myself and take it from there. Of course, there are things that interest me, but I don’t know how they all fit into this role.”
But closely guarded by his personal politics, he wore his reading habits on his sleeve and sleeve.
According to him, the copy of “Iliad” he borrowed from the Cincinnati library had become an unwitting “pain point” in his home.
“My 7-year-old immediately grabbed it and started reading, and then I went ahead and realized there was a lot of content that I hadn’t completely checked out for him at this point. So I took it and we had a long argument about who could sing it and when,” he said, adding that Vance would “probably let me sing some of it.”
What the public knows about Usha Vance, whom a high school friend described as a “bookworm” at a school 2022 New York Times profile — largely covers his distinguished academic and legal career: studying history at Yale University, followed by an M.A. in early modern history at Cambridge University, complete with degrees from Yale Law School, appellate and Supreme Court. Court clerkship and work at a large corporate law firm.
He also taught English in China as part of a Yale fellowship program. according to a statement from the universityAs an undergraduate, Vance noted that he devoted “most of his time” to public education, editing an education policy journal and volunteering at nearby elementary schools.
As JD Vance noted on the campaign trail, he left the corporate law firm in July following the senator’s VP bid.
“The day Donald Trump asked me to run for vice president, he actually quit his job because he wanted to be on the road with me, he wanted to support me and he wanted to get out there and get the message out there,” JD Vance said in an interview with Newsmax in August. “That means we have to win, right? If he quits and we don’t win, he’ll be mad at me.”
At campaign events, he often sits in one of the front rows her husband’s challenge on stage. At smaller, less formal events — when the senator visits a local store or restaurant after a campaign event — Usha Vance is often at his side, greeting patrons while the vice presidential candidate works the room.
The senator has been talking about his wife for a long time adviser, both before and during his years in office. According to him, this partnership is also a two-way street.
“I think he takes everything I say very seriously and respectfully. And it becomes part of the way he thinks about things, as is true for me,” Usha Vance said in an interview with Fox News a few weeks after the Republican convention this summer, her only interview since JD Vance joined the GOP presidential ticket.
“The way he talked about things and the conclusions he came to really shaped the way I thought about things,” he said, adding a happy give-and-take.
JD Vance gave a nod to the pair’s collaboration thanks to his best-selling book Hillbilly Elegy.
“Last but certainly not least is my lovely, supportive wife, Usha, who has read every word of my manuscript dozens of times, giving necessary feedback (even when I didn’t ask for it!),” wrote JD Vance. I noted with me when I felt like quitting and as I progressed.
The book also mentions that Usha Vance lived a long life love of literature.
“Usha often bought books for Christmas,” wrote JD Vance.
In an era when a social media campaign is as powerful as an in-person one, Usha Vance has no public social media accounts — a stark contrast to the responsive online persona her husband has deployed against critics.
However, he has one profile on the popular website Goodreads readers can record reading habits and rate books. A profile bearing the surname Chilukuri shows over 60 ratings from 2007 to 2016 and a wide range of genres and authors, from Zadie Smith to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.
These days, he said, most of his reading comes from a book club with college friends, despite his busy campaign travel schedule.
“I think one of the challenges in a book club with a group of people my age is that they all have kids and they all have jobs now, and so they have less time, especially for those who read professionally. I have less time to do that than I do right now,” Vance said.
“As opposed to something that’s hard for me, it’s a really nice thing that they’re doing to reach out to me. But we read very slowly for that book club.”
Even though my Goodreads account was down, I continued to read. His most recent entry, Hillbilly Elegy, marked as a “read” in late May 2016, received the coveted five stars – an award given to only eight other books on his virtual shelf.
Of the dozen readings he entered, only one produced a written response. Five days after 2010 he He gave Herbert Butterfield’s Whig Interpretation of History a four-star review. Although the positive rating was more than the 3.05 average shown on her profile landing page, the then Cambridge student wrote: “Could have been half as long.”
Now, the physical size of each book labeled in a decidedly digital election did not prove an obstacle. The Iliad first appeared during a weekend trip to Pennsylvania in mid-September with Vance’s three young children. Crossing the tarmac to collect various toys and stuffed animals to bring back on the plane, Usha Vans clutched her children’s coats with considerable bulk.
Spare book, he went to another campaign event.