V-P's private counsel: Usha Vance’s new life in Trump’s Washington

She has settled her three children into new schools, set up play dates and overseen the childproofing of her 9,000-square-foot home.

She takes the children to the second lady’s office overlooking the Washington Monument, attends Mass with her family in the Virginia suburbs and hikes on wooded trails around Washington, the Secret Service in tow.

She has a warm relationship with the President of the United States, who marvels over her academic credentials and tells her she is beautiful, a senior administration official said. She gets along with Melania Trump, the first lady, too.

Less than a year ago, Usha Vance, a one-time Democrat and the daughter of immigrants, was living a radically different life as a litigator for a progressive law firm while raising her children in Ohio. Many old friends are bewildered by her transformation. She may be the wife of the vice president, they say, but she must be appalled by the Trump administration’s attacks on academia, law firms, judges, diversity programs and immigrants.

Others say she likes the respite from her legal career and the glamour and influence of her new role. She always supported her husband’s ambitions, they note, even if she did not necessarily share them. People close to the vice president, who went from being a vocal critic of now-President Donald Trump to his running mate, argue that Vance went on a similar but less public journey that soured her on the left.

Either way, colleagues say, she is a model, at least for now, of a movement embraced by the White House and pushed by her husband that encourages women to have more children and celebrate the family as the centrepiece of American life.

“I think she’s doing a great job as second lady of the US,” Vice President JD Vance said in March in Bay City, Michigan, with Usha Vance standing behind him. “And here’s the thing: Because the cameras are all on, anything that I say, no matter how crazy, Usha has to smile and laugh and celebrate it.”

Online critics slammed the vice president for sexism. But those who know the couple say that no matter her silence in public, JD Vance leans on his wife’s counsel in private.

“Her influence on her husband is incalculable,” said the senior Trump administration official, who has worked with Usha Vance on and off for the past year and asked not to be named. The official described the second lady as someone who has “well-considered” opinions on marriage, politics and faith, but holds herself at reserve.

If Vance, 39, is not happy with all aspects of the Trump White House, friends say she would never let on. “Her history and her upbringing suggest it,” the administration official said, “but she’s married to JD, and at some point you have to accept it.”

Usha Vance has largely stayed out of the fray over the administration’s political and policy agenda, even as her husband has continued to be a polarising figure. The one exception was in March when she planned a trip to see a national dog-sled race in Greenland, which Trump said he wants to take over from Denmark. Vance made a cheerful video ahead of the trip, but it was ultimately downsized to a brief stop with her husband at a US military base after strong objections from Greenlanders.

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