J.D. Vance’s Wife Usha Enters the Political Stage Amid Vice Presidential Speculation: ‘I Believe in J.D.’

Usha Vance, Sen. J.D. Vance’s (R-OH) wife,  took the political stage on Wednesday, explaining much of what drives the senator’s thoughts and actions.

Fox News interviewed the Vances as speculation grows that Trump may soon choose his vice presidential candidate; Vance is rumored to be one of the possible choices. Trump’s pick is most likely going to attend Thursday’s CNN debate between the former president and President Joe Biden.

“I don’t think people understand how hard he works. And how creative he is. Everything he says and does is built on a foundation of so much thought. He’s always trying to do better,” Usha Vance said of her husband.

“I believe in J.D. and I love him,” she added.

As Fox News host Lawrence Jones noted, Usha is accomplished in her own right. She is a litigator in the San Francisco, California, and Washington, DC, offices of Munger, Tolles & Olson. Vance’s wife has clerked for Chief Justice John Roberts as well as then-judge and now Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.

In a 2017 interview with NBC News, Usha said that they met at Yale law school.

The New York Times in 2022 described how Usha has helped guide J.D., even back at Yale Law School, where they organized a discussion group on the subject of “social decline in white America.”

“She instinctively understood the questions I didn’t even know to ask and she always encouraged me to seek opportunities that I didn’t know existed,” J.D. Vance wrote in Hillbilly Elegy.

In a recent interview with the New York Times‘s Ross Douthat, the Buckeye State senator said that, in a similar way to Trump, he had to burn bridges by advocating for his populist agenda.

Douthat asked:

Let me put the question differently. One interpretation of why conservatives trust Trump is that by saying things that are offensive to the conventions of elite liberalism, he’s effectively burning his ships. He can never just go back to being host of “The Apprentice.” And one interpretation of your Senate campaign was that you were consciously doing the same thing, that you were trying to piss liberals off to make yourself seem more trustworthy to Republican voters. Did you think about it that way?

Vance responded:

I didn’t think about it quite that way, but before I ran, I had this conversation with myself and my wife that if my underlying critique is correct, there’s no way to run the campaign without burning bridges. You have to self-consciously accept that previous friends of yours are going to think you’re a bad person.

Vance, with the support of his wife, has only leaned more into his populist message.

When asked by Fox News how he would describe his ideal economy, he said, “A lot more manufacturing jobs than we have right now. The economies that really thrive, they’ve got a foundation of strong manufacturing. They’re developing their own energy.”

On border security, Vance said, “You’ve got to be willing to deport people who come here illegally. You’ve got to be willing to construct that border wall…The most important thing is you cannot have Republicans who are terrified of being called bad names by the media.”