When Usha Vance stood beside her husband on Inauguration Day, watching J.D. Vance take the oath of office as Vice President of the United States, she looked serene. Composed. Unbothered. In a soft pink wool coat, accented with oversized floral earrings and her signature streak of silver hair swept into a bun, she embodied grace under pressure—and quiet resistance in a movement not built for her.
It was a striking image. The daughter of Indian immigrants, raised Hindu, now the Second Lady of the United States in the second Trump administration. But while the photos were celebratory, the comment sections told a different story.
“Christ is King, not some stinky Indian idol,” one MAGA-aligned user posted. “Will there be a cow in the White House soon?” asked another. The mockery wasn’t about policy. It was about presence. Identity. Faith. Usha knows this. And yet, she remains calm, strategic—and unfazed.
The Immigrant Success Story MAGA Can’t Digest
Born Usha Chilukuri, she was raised in San Diego, the daughter of two Indian immigrants who arrived in the 1980s to build a better life. Her father was a mechanical engineer. Her mother, a molecular biologist. Usha soared—earning degrees from Yale and Cambridge, editing the Yale Law Journal, and clerking for Chief Justice John Roberts and Judge Brett Kavanaugh.
Friends from Yale Law still describe her as “formidable,” “ridiculously intelligent,” and “almost intimidating in her composure.” One classmate noted she could have easily become Solicitor General by 40.
Instead, she married J.D. Vance—Marine, author of Hillbilly Elegy, and now MAGA’s heir apparent.
Their marriage, as one friend put it, is a partnership of “two people who weren’t supposed to meet.” He grew up in a chaotic, working-class household in Middletown, Ohio. She grew up in a quiet, achievement-focused suburb. He arrived at Yale with debt and a chip on his shoulder. She came with impeccable credentials and an instinct to defuse, not escalate.
Together, they represent what America often claims to be—but rarely makes space for: pluralistic, post-tribal, unexpectedly united.
The MAGA-Desi Civil War
Indian-Americans, long seen as a “model minority,” had become increasingly visible within conservative circles—sparking admiration and backlash in equal measure. Vivek Ramaswamy had a star turn during the campaign and is now a frontrunner for Governor of Ohio. Kash Patel, Jay Bhattacharya, Sriram Krishnan, and even Tulsi Gabbard (an honorary desi in the eyes of many) now hold influential positions in the administration.
And yet, the resentment remains palpable. MAGA’s evangelical wing bristles at non-Christian figures shaping policy. Anti-immigration voices frame Indian-American technocrats as elitist interlopers. What began as admiration for their credentials has curdled into suspicion. Some far-right commentators have even described it as “an invasion by tech elites.”
In her first interview as Second Lady, she addressed the online racism that spiked after a 25-year-old Indian engineer tried to popularise the phrase “normalize Indian hate”—and was later rehired by Elon Musk, reportedly at J.D. Vance’s urging. “Do I think it’s great when people talk about ‘normalising Indian hate’? Absolutely not. I think it’s terrible,” she told The Free Press. Still, she stopped short of a sweeping indictment. “I think it’s our relationship to this information… that is potentially new,” she said. “Very, very intelligent people say things that are sometimes very, very ill-founded because we are now in this world in which all conversations happen based on limited information very quickly.” It was a shift in frame—from hate to media structure, from bigotry to the digital churn. The pivot was subtle, but telling.
“It Can Be a Very Lonely, Lonely World”
Vice President JD Vance, left, and second lady Usha Vance pose during a tour of Pituffik Space Base, in Greenland. (AP/PTI)
Much of Usha’s public role is shaped by absence—by what she doesn’t say, doesn’t do, doesn’t signal. But in that same interview, she offered a glimpse into the private realities of life beside one of the most polarising men in American politics. “I don’t know that he’s asking me for advice so much as, it can be a very lonely, lonely world not to share with someone,” she said. This, more than anything, sketches the emotional architecture of the Vance marriage: two people who are insiders and outsiders, bound by love and by a shared sense of remove. Their intimacy is not forged through political alliance, but through existential oddity. “There are plenty of people who caricature others on the right,” she added. “It’s really easy to do that.” Empathy, in Usha’s world, is a strategic posture—but not an insincere one.
“People Don’t Seem to Care All That Much What I Look Like”
Asked what it feels like to be a brown woman in a world of blondes, Botox, and Fox News glam, Usha responds with characteristic restraint. “It would be really hard for me to be blonde,” she joked. “That colour would look totally absurd.” She lets her hair go grey. She doesn’t use a stylist. She’s not concerned with optics. “For what it’s worth,” she added, “my reception into this world… has been really positive.” Whether that’s wholly true or simply the truth she chooses to see is unclear. But it speaks to her method: focus on the humanity in front of you, not the hostility behind the screen.
A Soft Power Strategy in a Hard Power Movement
Vice President JD Vance, second right, his wife Usha Vance, second left, and their children Vivek, from left, Ewan and Mirabel arrive at an indoor Presidential Inauguration parade event in Washington. AP/PTI(
What makes Usha Vance so effective—and so difficult to categorise—is that she never argues. She simply exists. She wears a sari to the inauguration and offers no explanation. She introduces her husband at the Republican National Convention without leaning into jingoism or affect. She raises three children in a fortress on a hill and insists on reading physical books.
At the moment, she’s reading Brooklyn, by Colm Tóibín—a novel about an Irish immigrant woman torn between two countries, two selves.
The metaphor is hard to miss. Usha Vance isn’t fighting MAGA’s culture war. She’s refusing to be defined by it.
The Insider as Outsider
Political scientist Paul Sracic once remarked: “It’s difficult to accuse Vance of being sympathetic to white nationalists when his wife is Indian American and his children are Indian American. That insulates him from that attack.” That may be true. But Usha’s role isn’t merely to insulate. It’s to complicate the narrative.
She’s the insider who can’t quite belong. The immigrant daughter who rarely speaks about immigration. The Hindu woman whose gods remain suspect in a movement still centred around Christian nationalism. When asked what the media gets wrong about her husband, she doesn’t bristle. “There are lots of people who have just imagined all sorts of narratives about us,” she said. “To me, the highest priority right now is to be actually a normal person.” It’s a goal that politics rarely permits—and that MAGA, with its appetite for spectacle, may never truly understand.
The Second Lady in the Library
Each morning, Usha Vance reads in the green-painted library of the vice president’s residence. There’s a fireplace. Silence. A kind of enforced stillness. Her children—Ewan, Vivek, and Mirabel—race through the halls above. “One of the ways to counteract [this world] is to read paper books,” she told The Free Press. As if turning pages could buffer a person from the chaos just outside the door. It’s a lonely place to be normal. But Usha Vance is very good at being alone in plain sight.