The Ritual Humiliation of Usha Vance
Don’t cry for the second lady. She’s in a gilded cage of her own choosing.
It seems abundantly clear that Usha Chilukuri Vance never dreamed of being second lady (sometimes known by the rather unfortunate acronym of “SLOTUS.”)
Her life reads as an aspirational case study of American meritocracy: a daughter of Indian immigrant academics who went on to graduate from Yale summa cum laude, become a Gates Cambridge Scholar, and clerk for not one, but two Supreme Court justices before landing at a top law firm.
When her husband, in a rare moment of humanity on the ‘24 campaign trail, admitted she is “way more accomplished than I am,” that may have been the last honest thing J.D. Vance said.
But he’s long made his love affair with traditional gender roles central to his far-right politics, idealizing marriage — even for those in “unhappy” and “maybe even violent“ unions — and lecturing single women that motherhood is their only “path to happiness and to fulfillment.” It was only a matter of time before Usha would be expected to sacrifice her high-flying career at the altar of his political ambitions.
She bet on the dark side of America — the MAGA side — surmising that it was smarter to let her husband ascend because voters would accept a doughy, mediocre white guy over a brilliant Hindu attorney.
And so, when Donald Trump tapped Vance as his running mate, the announcement quickly followed that Usha would be leaving her job at Munger, Tolles & Olson to stay home with their three kids.
Since her husband has become the second most powerful man in the nation, Usha has been called upon for mostly dull assignments, like appearing on Megan McCain’s dreadful podcast last year. At the end, McCain said she had to address “the elephant in the room … that you could be our first lady in a few years.”
At this point, Usha finally perked up a bit and dismissed the question, musing: “In a dream world, eventually I’ll be able to live in my home and kind of continue my career and all those sorts of things.”
But it turns out that she might not be so nostalgic for her old life, after all. On Sunday, Usha gave birth to a baby boy, Alec Neel Vance — the first child born to a sitting vice president in more than 150 years. The announcements rolled in with the warm, soft-focus coverage you’d expect about the busy life of the second family with four kids under 10 — a nice, history-making footnote.
It’s the kind of story that’s supposed to make you feel gooey inside (and perhaps forget about the death of four servicemembers in Trump’s botched Iran war or the slew of recent ICE killings on our streets).
But like everything in Trump World, there’s always an explicitly political subtext. The VP wrote in his new book, Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith, that the couple decided to expand their family after attending a Turning Point USA event where Erika Kirk confided that she wished she and Charlie had had more time to have more kids.
This is also an administration where, in concert with Trump’s anti-immigrant policies, Stephen Miller and Elon Musk make explicit, ugly arguments about declining native birth rates. And Vance has told Americans that people without children shouldn’t get a full vote.
The personal is explicitly political in MAGA World, something a woman as brilliant as Usha Vance well knows.
The Melania Model
There’s a durable D.C. press habit of treating the wives of powerful right-wing men as potential dissidents — women who married the ambition, but might privately recoil from the cruelty.
We were treated to years of cloying “free Melania” posts during Trump’s first term, even though she donned a jacket emblazoned with the words, “I Really Don’t Care, Do U?” while visiting immigrant kids at a border detention center.
The first lady later admitted she wore it to troll people, especially the “left-wing media who are criticizing me.”