The conundrum that is America’s Second Lady Usha Vance keeps cropping up at dinner parties? Who is she really? Is she in heaven or is she in hell? Is she complicit in her situation or appalled by it? First Lady chronicler, Kate Brower just published an excellent Vanity Fair profile on the Second Lady and agreed to go live with me.
A Yale liberal in a MAGA world
We started with the basic contradictions: Usha Vance voted for Hillary Clinton and was a registered Democrat until 2022. Yet she is now the second most high-profile woman in MAGA land; She’s Hindu, yet she’s married to a man who wrote a bestselling memoir about his conversion to Catholicism and has said, publicly, that he’d like her to convert too.
She’s whip-smart and accomplished; she graduated summa-cum-laude from Yale Law School, clerking for Justice John Roberts and worked in corporate law - and yet now she’s given birth to a fourth baby, plays a public supporting role, and talks about children’s books on a podcast.
Her mother, Lakshmi Chilukuri, a microbiologist, isn’t just liberal-adjacent — she’s a DEI trailblazer. Dr. Chilukuri created a course at UC San Diego, officially titled “Exploring Issues of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in Relation to Human Biology”. Unsurprisingly, Dr. Chilukuri has not been photographed anywhere near the Trump White House.
So….is Usha Vance a long-suffering victim who has been forced into a trad-wife mold thanks to her ambitious husband? Or is it more complicated?
According to Kate’s reporting, yes, it’s a lot more complicated. Usha’s Yale Law school friends emphatically say she is not a victim. She’s a detail-oriented meticulous thinker who is as interested in power as her husband and is content, for now at least, with the role she is playing.
And yet there are quiet signs of rebellion, indications that she isn’t fully immersed in every aspect of Trump World.
Kate dropped one detail in our conversation that didn’t make it into the Vanity Fair piece: Usha’s hairdresser has been urging her for a while to dye the grey streaks in her hair.
She won’t.
Apparently she’s comfortable in her own skin in a world that rewards exactly the opposite.
Speaking of:….
We pivoted to the First Lady, who is facing a different problem — Invisibility. Where is she these days? She can’t hide behind the excuse of looking after Barron any more.
And why has Melania’s foster care program working to return Ukrainian children taken by Russia raised only $2 million?
And, conversely just how many millions is she raking in from licensing agreements? A LOT…. It’s unprecedented.
Enjoy our conversation!
Thank you Jeanne Elbe, An Mcgreevy, Robert Jaffee, Shannon Edrie, Natalie Doyle, PhD, and many others for tuning into my live video with Kate Brower! Join me for my next live video in the app.
