As Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance campaigns across the country, his wife, Usha Vance, has been a near-constant presence by his side. In the final weeks of the campaign, she has traveled with her own regular companion: a copy of “The Iliad.”
Her edition of the Greek epic — a celebrated 800-page translation from 2023 by University of Pennsylvania classicist Emily Wilson — has accompanied Vance across the country, briefly visible as she has boarded and exited campaign planes in Pennsylvania, Arizona, Michigan, Colorado and California.
“That’s because our now 7-year-old decided in the spring that he was obsessed with mythology,” Vance said in a rare phone interview. “He picked up a child’s version of ‘The Odyssey’ and then ‘The Iliad’ and all these other things and became completely obsessed. So to keep up with him, I decided it was time to pick ‘The Iliad’ up myself.”
The volume is just one piece of a larger, growing library of books she has torn through in three months on the campaign trail, the dust covers visible to reporters on airport tarmacs around the country.
Early in her time on the trail, she traveled with Daniel Mason’s “North Woods,” a story that follows the inhabitants of a single New England house from colonial America to the present day. American Irish author Tana French’s “In the Woods” came along for at least two separate trips, including a day trip to southwestern Virginia to survey storm damage in the days after Hurricane Helene tore through the region.
Alec Hernandez / NBC News; Getty Images
On a noisy central Florida airport tarmac in late September as her husband finished a conference call, rather than ducking into an SUV in the idling motorcade nearby, Vance took a moment standing in the fresh air to read, balancing a hardcover copy of Anthony Doerr’s “Cloud Cuckoo Land” on her left arm as wind and nearby engine fans curled the corners of the pages.No battleground-hopper flight has been too short or campaign day too packed for Vance to travel without a book in hand. They have provided a repeated, if fleeting, ritual glimpse into the far-from-public persona of a potential second lady.
Though she’s a fixture on the campaign trail, Vance has not occupied a forward-facing public role like other political spouses. She has not delivered remarks at a public campaign event since introducing her husband at the Republican convention, instead adopting a more behind-the-scenes role, including helping advise him during his vice presidential debate prep.
“Obviously, at the convention, I was asked to introduce JD, and so that was an active role,” Vance said. “But the thing that JD asked, and the thing that I certainly agreed to do, is to keep him company,” she added, saying unrelenting campaign travel can prove disorienting.
“I think it makes him all the more enthusiastic to do it,” Vance continued, “to have company, someone to talk to in between and someone to talk to you about things that are either entirely unrelated to the events, or just maybe to get my perception on how a particular rally went or particular set of questions or that sort of thing but from my perspective as his wife and his best friend, as opposed to the perspective that other people who are on the plane can give.”
If former President Donald Trump is elected again, Usha Vance would become the youngest second lady, at 38, since the mid-20th century, jumping into a role that predecessors have been active in supporting White House-backed policy initiatives. First lady Jill Biden has homed in on education initiatives and partnered with former first lady Michelle Obama on programs supporting military families. Doug Emhoff, the country’s first second gentleman as husband to Vice President Kamala Harris, has helped develop the first National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism. Lynne Cheney, a former chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities, wrote children’s books and participated with then-first lady Laura Bush on some programming around education and literacy.
“You know, this is such an intense and busy experience that I have not given a ton of thought to my own roles and responsibilities. It’s just something that I’ve never really — it’s not something I’m terribly familiar with,” Vance said of the work she would consider taking on as a potential second lady.
“And so I thought, what would I do? See what happens on Nov. 5, and collect some information myself and take it from there. There are certainly things I’m interested in, but I don’t really know how that all fits into this role.”
But with her personal politics under close guard on the trail, she has worn her reading habits on her sleeve — and under her arm.
Her copy of “The Iliad,” borrowed from a Cincinnati library, has become an unintentional “sore spot” in her household, she said.
“My 7-year-old immediately grabbed it and started reading it, and then I flipped ahead and realized that it contained a lot of content that I hadn’t totally vetted for him at this point. So I’ve taken it away, and we have kind of a long-standing argument about who gets to read it when,” she said, adding that the Vances would “probably let him read some of it.”
What the public knows about Usha Vance — whom a high school classmate described as a “bookworm” in a 2022 New York Times profile — largely includes her prestigious academic and legal career: studying history at Yale University, followed by a stint at the University of Cambridge for a master of philosophy degree in early-modern history, rounded out with a degree from Yale Law School, appellate and Supreme Court clerkships and a stint at a major corporate law firm.
She also taught English in China as part of a Yale fellowship program, according to an announcement from the university, which noted that Vance “devoted much of her time” as an undergraduate “to public education,” editing an education policy journal and serving as a volunteer in nearby elementary schools.
As JD Vance has noted on the campaign trail, she left her corporate law firm following the senator’s nomination for vice president in July.
“She actually quit her job the day that Donald Trump asked me to become the VP nominee because she wants to be on the road with me, she wants to be supportive, and she wants to get out there and take the message forward,” JD Vance said in an August interview on Newsmax. “That means we got to win, right? She’s gonna be mad at me if she quit her job and we don’t win.”
At campaign events, she often sits in one of the front rows, catching a callout from her husband onstage. At smaller, less formal events — like when the senator visits a local shop or restaurant after a campaign event — Usha Vance is often by his side, greeting patrons as the vice presidential hopeful works the room.
The senator has long cited his wife as a counselor, both prior to and during his years in office. That partnership, she has said, is also a two-way street.
“I think that he treats everything I say with a lot of seriousness and respect. And that becomes a part of the way that he thinks about things, as is true for me,” Usha Vance said in an interview on Fox News in the weeks after this summer’s Republican convention, her only other interview since JD Vance joined the GOP presidential ticket.
“The way that he talks about things and the conclusions he comes to really shaped the way that I think about things,” she added, describing a happy “give and take.”
In the acknowledgements of his own bestselling book, “Hillbilly Elegy,” JD Vance nodded to the couple’s collaboration.
“Last, but certainly not least, is my darling wife, Usha,” JD Vance wrote, “who read every single word of my manuscript literally dozens of times, offered needed feedback (even when I didn’t want it!), supported me when I felt like quitting, and celebrated with me during times of progress.”
The book also noted Usha Vance’s longtime love of literature.
“Usha often received books for Christmas,” JD Vance wrote.
In an age when social media campaigning is as robust as in person, Usha Vance does not have public social media accounts — a stark contrast to the reply-guy online persona her husband has deployed against critics.
However, she does have a profile on Goodreads, a popular website where readers can log their reading habits and rate books. The profile, bearing her family name, Chilukuri, shows over 60 ratings from 2007 to 2016 and a wide range of genres and authors, from Zadie Smith to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.
Right now, she said, many of the books she reads come from a book club with friends from college, her intense campaign travel schedule notwithstanding.
“I think one of the challenges with a book club with a bunch of people my age is that they all have children and they all have jobs right now, and so they actually have less time to — especially the ones who kind of read professionally — have less time to do this than I do this moment,” Vance said.
“It’s actually really nice thing that they’re doing to stay in touch with me, as opposed to something that’s challenging for me to do. But we read at a pretty slow pace for that book club.”
The reading has continued, though the Goodreads account is dormant. Her most recent entry marked as “read” in late May 2016, “Hillbilly Elegy,” got a coveted five stars — an accolade bestowed only on eight other books on her virtual shelf.
Only one of her dozens of logged reads elicited a written response. Five days into 2010, she gave a four-star review to Herbert Butterfield’s “The Whig Interpretation of History.” Though the positive ranking was over the 3.05 average displayed on her profile’s landing page, the then-Cambridge student wrote: “Could have been half the length.”
Now, the physical size of each book tagging along in a decidedly digital election has not proven an obstacle. “The Iliad” made its first appearance during a mid-September weekend trip across Pennsylvania, along with the Vances’ three young children. Stepping across the tarmac to collect miscellaneous toys and stuffed animals to bring back to the plane, Usha Vance wedged her children’s raincoats into the same arm as the substantial volume.
Book in tow, she was off to another campaign event.
Leave a Reply