Who is Usha Vance, America's next second lady?
Usha Vance applauds her husband JD Vance on election night.
Donald Trump's high-profile running mate, JD Vance, is anything but media shy.
But his wife, Usha Vance, while often flanking him on the campaign trail, has said very little publicly.
It's prompted some to describe her as a "political enigma" and a "total mystery".
One op-ed suggested she wasn't "following the script" typically expected of a political spouse.
She wears many hats — daughter of immigrants, Yale graduate, lawyer, wife and mother-of-three.
Her husband's meteoric rise to the White House second-in-line comes at a time when Indian Americans are a growing political force.
But her Indian roots have attracted racist backlash from the far-right, including from Trump's supporters.
Indian heritage
While Kamala Harris's ancestral village may have despaired at the US election result, some 900 kilometres away, another Indian village was celebrating the Trump team's win.
The Indian Express reported "euphoria" in Usha Vance's ancestral village of Vadluru, in the southern coastal state of Andhra Pradesh, where locals distributed sweets and celebrated with crackers and prayers.
Villagers at a temple in the village of Vadluru celebrate Trump's election win.
She was born Usha Bala Chilukuri to Indian scientists, who immigrated to the US shortly before she was born.
She and Vance met at Yale Law school and have three children together: Ewan, Vivek and Mirabel.
Academic excellence appears to run in the family; her father and grandfather both taught or studied at India's premier engineering college, and her sister is a mechanical engineer with a semiconductor company.
Her 96-year-old great aunt — an expert in physics living in India — was recently celebrated in the Indian press as the country's oldest active professor.
A high-achieving lawyer
At the Republican National Conference earlier this year, she gave a rare speech on stage, in which she did not name Trump.
She said she and JD Vance became friends first and described him as the most interesting person she knew.
"A working-class guy who had overcome childhood traumas that I could barely fathom, to end up at Yale law school," she said.
She said he "approached our differences with curiosity and enthusiasm" — that he adapted to her vegetarian diet and learned to cook Indian food from her mother.
The childhood home where JD Vance grew up in Middletown, Ohio.
In his book Hillbilly Elegy, Mr Vance described Ms Vance as "super smart" and listed her positive qualities — "bright, hardworking, tall and beautiful".
He credits Ms Vance in the memoir for telling him what fork to use at an important dinner.
A high-profile lawyer, she worked as a law clerk for judge Brett Kavanaugh prior to his nomination to the Supreme Court.
Seven weeks after giving birth to her first child, she began a clerkship for Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts.
She resigned from her law firm Munger Tolles in the middle of this year when Mr Vance became Trump's running mate.
What does a 'second spouse' do?
While the role of the vice-president's partner is not paid or formally defined, they have traditionally been expected to perform hosting and society functions.
"For much of American history, the spouse of the vice-president of the United States did not maintain a prominent public role," an explainer on the White House Historical Association says.
"However, as the Office of Vice President has evolved over time to include more responsibilities, power, influence, and resources, the 'second spouse' has also grown in recognition and stature."
Patricia Nixon expanded on the role during her husband Richard Nixon's terms as vice-president from 1953 to 1961, travelling and attending events independently and visiting hospitals, orphanages, and other local community organisations.
In the late 1970s, funding was officially allocated to support the second spouse's activities in support of the vice-president and during the 1980s an office was established for the second spouse on the second floor of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, next to the vice-president's.
In recent years, second spouses have been known to advocate publicly on issues, serve on task forces and promote causes.
Political views 'a mystery'
According to a profile of Usha Vance in The Cut — a piece for which she declined to be interviewed — friends described her as well-liked, academically impressive, and said "that her inner life was a black box".
The profile quoted an anonymous ex-friend about Ms Vance standing by Mr Vance as he transformed from a "Never Trumper" to Trump's running mate.
Usha Vance remained relatively quiet during the US presidential campaign.
"Initially, I thought, 'Surely she can't be OK with this, and she's going to divorce him in time'," the ex-friend told The Cut.
"Then I saw her at the Republican National Convention and thought, 'Could she actually be on board?’"
Ms Vance was once a registered Democrat, and the Daily Beast reported Mr Vance told a friend she planned to vote for Hillary Clinton in 2016.
According to the New York Times, Ms Vance's parents were registered Democrats and her mother signed a letter from professors to Trump, calling on him to not withdraw from the Paris climate change accords.
One acquaintance, legal writer David Lat, said the couple reminded him of Bill and Hillary Clinton.
"One thing that struck me as Hillary-esque was that Usha seemed to have more polish than JD," Lat said in The Cut.
In an interview with the New York Times, Mr Vance described how Ms Vance was raised a Hindu, but supported his conversion to Catholicism in 2019.
"She's got three kids," he said.
"Obviously I help with the kids, but because I'm kind of the one going to church, she feels more responsibility to keep the kids quiet in the church.
"And I just felt kind of bad. Like, oh, you didn't sign up to marry a weekly churchgoer. Are you OK with this? And she was more than OK with it."
Racist backlash
Ironically, Usha Vance appears to embody aspects at odds with some of Trump's supporters, who often espouse anti-immigrant and anti-elite rhetoric.
She and her husband have been the subject of racist tweets throughout the campaign.
One of the more overt examples came from Nick Fuentes, a political pundit and streamer who has aired white supremacist views.
"Who is this guy, really? Do we really expect that the guy who has an Indian wife and named their kid Vivek is going to support white identity?" he said.
"This guy's going to defend American identity?
"How else could you countenance American identity if you have a mixed-up family like that?"
The election win was celebrated in India, but Usha Vance's heritage sparked racist commentary during the campaign.
In response, JD Vance told journalist Megyn Kelly: "Obviously, she's not a white person, and we've been accused — attacked — by some white supremacists over that," he said.
"But I just — I love Usha. She's such a good mum, she's such a brilliant lawyer and I'm so proud of her."
He later said if people wanted to criticise him, they should leave his wife out of it.
"If these guys want to attack me or attack my views, my policy views, my personality, come after me," he said.
"But don't attack my wife. She's out of your league."
By：ABC(责任编辑：admin)
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