“She seemed some sort of genetic anomaly, a combination of every positive quality a human being should have: bright, hardworking, tall, and beautiful”—this is how Vice President JD Vance recalls meeting his wife, Usha Vance, for the first time at Yale Law School. His initial impression was undoubtedly proven true. Usha went on to land a prestigious clerkship under US Chief Justice John Roberts and pursue corporate law under San Francisco corporate firm Munger, Tolles & Olsen. She was, by all accounts, a woman with her gaze levied on an ambitious career.
Yet her promised career did not bear fruit. By 2024, Usha had yet to make partner. “You would expect somebody with that résumé and that many years out to be a partner,” legal commentator David Lat said in an interview with The Cut.
Back home, Usha was juggling three kids and a husband who had found a home in the MAGA fold. JD, who had once privately called Trump “America’s Hitler,” was announced as Trump’s VP running mate.
Entering the public eye as the first Asian American Second Lady in American history, Usha is once again—to parrot JD—an “anomaly.” Rather than an impossible combination of positive qualities, however, Usha emerges as an anomaly amongst American conservative ideology. The daughter of Telugu Indian immigrants, a former registered Democrat, and a career-driven woman, Usha embodies everything that conservative America resists. Still, she has been praised by Trump and his inner circle.
Between the Vances, Usha is heralded as the “smart” one. Even Trump seemed acutely aware of Usha’s success, quipping after his inaugural address, “[JD] was a great senator and a very, very smart one […] the only one smarter is his wife.”
Trump went on to say “I would have chosen her, but somehow the line of succession didn’t work that way, right?” he joked, eliciting laughter from JD.
The “line of succession” did not pan out in Usha’s favor because the extent to which a model minority can assimilate into conservative America has proven limited. Model minorities like Usha are conditionally welcomed into the conservative fold due to their structural role in undermining affirmative action and critical race theories. Similarly, reactionary gender politics ensure that even “exceptional” women must ultimately defer to more structurally powerful counterparts, reinforcing both racial and patriarchal dominance.
The model minority myth primes Asian Americans for conservative assimilation, portraying them as hardworking, apolitical, and proof that the United States is a true meritocracy. Usha has exemplified these traits, working tirelessly in her law career and keeping her political beliefs close to her chest despite her husband’s political involvement.
This stereotype emerged amid the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s—pitting Asians against other minorities even at its genesis—with articles published in The New York Times Magazine and the US News and World Report portraying Japanese and Chinese-Americans as successful minorities. The press ran rampant with explanations for this unprecedented academic and economic success, accrediting everything from Confucianism to Tiger Moms, while overlooking that immigration regulations like the Immigration Act of 1990 and the H-1B visa program selectively welcome Asian immigrants employed in high-skill occupations. Success does not only stem from the individual—it is facilitated by the system.
Nobody has internalized this meritocratic tale that the model minority work ethic single-handedly prevails over institutional barriers more than Asian Americans themselves. According to a 2023 Pew Research Study, only one in five Asian American adults say race or ethnicity should be considered in college admissions.
The 2023 Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard case recruited Asian American plaintiffs in the landmark case against race-based affirmative action, arguing that Harvard’s holistic admissions process discriminated against Asian applicants by unfairly penalizing them in subjective categories such as “personality scores.”
The case not only divided Asian Americans but also reinforced conservative narratives about race and meritocracy. Conservative bloggers fearmonger that “eventually the government will enforce quotas at schools and the workplace to ensure racial equity, to advance diversity, and to redress past iniquities.” According to these bloggers, “ensuring a greater number of black and Hispanic students will require reducing the number of another ‘people of color’—Asian Americans.” Meanwhile, 2024 Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy (a child of South Asian immigrants) called affirmative action a “badly failed experiment” that should be replaced by “colorblind meritocracy.”
Ironically, many of the prominent Asian Americans who opposed affirmative action were educated at a time when affirmative action likely benefited them. Ramaswamy had never experienced a “colorblind meritocracy”—he is a reactionary benefactor of affirmative action, only changing his perspective when he no longer benefited from it.
Students for Fair Admissions achieved both of its goals: It won a six-two Supreme Court majority and brought Asian Americans further into the conservative fold, pitting them against other minority groups.
Usha Vance epitomizes the conservative ideal of model minorities. She is the “whiz kid,” an Ivy League shoo-in. According to family friends, she has “never gotten a B her entire life.” She sits at the nexus of two groups that have been allowed to succeed—just not too much. Just as the “bamboo ceiling” precludes model minorities from executive leadership, conservative assimilation imposes gendered limits as well—women must ultimately conform to traditional domestic roles. While they may succeed, it is always for the benefit of their husbands. Usha embodies this ideal.
In conservative media, Usha’s brilliance is depicted as an extension of JD’s. After her speech at the Republican National Convention, Mollie Hemingway, editor-in-chief of the right-wing news site, The Federalist, reverently wrote, “You’re telling us that JD Vance was able to get this super-hot, brilliant, and loving woman? He must be even more impressive than he already seems.”
As long as JD is framed as possessing—or “get[ting]”—Usha, her success can always be attributed to him. Usha herself, who rarely makes overtly political statements, has watched this narrative proliferate from the sidelines.
But her self-sidelining may be systemically necessary. Women who refuse to let their spouse’s success outshine their own face immense criticism—this was made abundantly clear with reactions to Vance’s campaign opponent, Kamala Harris.
As a half-Black woman, Harris has long received accusations of affirmation action delegitimizing her rise to power. She has been accused of drawing voters in because of her “ethnic background” and called a “DEI hire” by many. Former Trump administration official Sebastian Gorka claimed Harris was the Democratic nominee because “her skin color is the correct DEI color.”
As The Atlantic writer Adam Serwer explains, these racialized attacks are not unique to Harris. Barack Obama, too, was called an “affirmative-action president” and questioned over his citizenship.
But, as the first woman of color on a major presidential ticket, Harris faced a wider range of criticism. She was soon criticized for her dating status, her lack of children, and accusations of having “slept her way” to the top.
One of her most vocal critics was none other than JD Vance himself, who—despite having allegedly once told a friend he was open to being a stay-at-home-dad—has radically pivoted to a political platform built upon calling professional childless women “sociopathic” and “icky.” On the campaign trail, an interview resurfaced of JD criticizing women without children like Harris as “childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives.”
Simultaneously, he adopted a borderline compulsive rhetorical habit of highlighting Usha’s family focus. When speaking about his family, he referred to the children as belonging to Usha. “My wife has three little kids,” he told a conservative radio host in 2022. “She’s got three kids,” he said in October 2024 to the New York Times. All at once and helmed by her own husband, Usha’s public image has forcibly been reconstructed from a highly successful female lawyer to a stay-at-home mom of three.
Whether or not this is JD’s backward attempt at chivalrously protecting Usha from the inevitable criticism his own party would levy on her professional background, it has had the consequence of further reinforcing Asian Americans as deferential subjects. JD has gone to great lengths to convince his party that Usha is not a threat. Unlike Harris, she is pliable. She will concede.Usha can be the “bright” one. She can be the “hardworking” one. She can even be the “smarter” one. But as long as she—and model minorities like her—continue pandering toward conservative politics, she will never be the powerful one.