There are a few people to blame for the fact that JD Vance, a staggeringly unlikable man with a supremely meme-able face, has been thrust into such prominence. The first is Peter Thiel: the tech billionaire who bankrolled Vance’s political pivot. The second is Kevin D Roberts, head of the Heritage Foundation and mastermind of Project 2025, who has been an energetic Vance advocate.
And the third is Usha Chilukuri Vance, JD’s wife. While Usha kept a low profile during the Trump-Vance campaign, trailing after her other half with a smile on her face and a copy of The Iliad in her hand, JD has made her influence clear. In his memoir Hillbilly Elegy, for example, he wrote that Usha helped him navigate Yale and “always encouraged me to seek opportunities that I didn’t know existed”.
Usha has also always sought out opportunities for herself. The 39-year-old has the sort of CV ChatGPT might conjure up if you put “overachiever with political ambitions” as a prompt: Yale, then Cambridge, then back to Yale for law school, where she was an editor of the Yale Law Journal. From there she clerked for high-powered judges including supreme court chief justice John Roberts when he wrote a 5-4 ruling upholding Trump’s so-called Muslim ban.
Despite her own ambitions, Usha left her corporate law job when JD got a shot at DC. “She actually quit her job the day that Donald Trump asked me to become the VP nominee because she wants to be on the road with me,” JD Vance said in an interview last August. “That means we got to win, right? She’s gonna be mad at me if she quit her job and we don’t win.”
They won all right, but pretty much everyone in the US now thinks JD is a loser. He has historically bad favourability ratings and there are memes of him everywhere. I have absolutely no sympathy for Usha – who is far from a victim – but I have to wonder if she is starting to feel a little sorry for herself. As she and JD wandered around freezing cold Greenland over the weekend, unwelcomed by angry local people who didn’t want to be photographed anywhere near them, did she start to suspect that aligning herself with Trump – a man her own husband once called “America’s Hitler” – might not have been the wisest choice? If not, then perhaps Usha, who has been described as a “bookworm”, needs to put down The Iliad and read the room.
Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist
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