Usha Vance told friends Trump appalled her. Now she’s working to elect him.
Nicole MarkusJuly 27, 2024 at 6:00 a.m.
During her rise through America’s most prestigious schools, law firms and judicial clerkships, Usha Vance rarely — if ever — volunteered her opinions on the nation’s bitterly partisan politics to friends and colleagues.
But she did express revulsion at former president Donald Trump’s actions on Jan. 6, 2021.
Vance told friends she was outraged by Trump’s incitement of the deadly riot at the U.S. Capitol and lamented the social breakdown that fueled his political support, according to one friend, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive conversations. Her view at the time contrasts with the later pronouncements of her husband and Trump’s newly minted running mate, JD Vance, who has downplayed the storming of the Capitol and called participants who were jailed “political prisoners.”
“Usha found the incursion on the Capitol and Trump’s role in it to be deeply disturbing,” the friend recalled. “She was generally appalled by Trump, from the moment of his first election.”
Speaking the morning after Usha Vance introduced her husband at the Republican National Convention and watched his speech from the same VIP box as Trump, the friend added, “It was surreal to see her sitting next to him last night.”
That sensation is widely shared among her friends, former co-workers and fellow alumni, more than two dozen of whom spoke to The Washington Post for this story. Some watched in disbelief on July 17 when Usha Vance, 38, addressed an overwhelmingly White crowd on the convention floor that tittered uneasily as she joked about her husband learning to cook Indian food and audibly gasped when she mentioned her vegetarian diet.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/07/27/usha-vance-trump-jan6/