JD and Usha Vance’s Yale Law classmates have set up a private Signal group to try to make sense of the couple’s rise to MAGA stardom.
Usha Vance, 40, whose parents emigrated to the U.S. from India, finished a Yale history degree with the highest honors in 2007, took a master’s at Cambridge in the United Kingdom, and then went back to Yale for law school, where she met her future husband, now 42.
The Hillbilly Elegy author branded Donald Trump, 80, “America’s Hitler” in a message to a former college friend in 2016 but now ranks among the president’s loudest defenders as his vice president.
Classmates who’ve known the couple since law school were rattled by how far the “Never Trump Guy” and his wife had climbed and by their turnaround on MAGA, according to a new profile on Usha by Vanity Fair.
Whatever chats may have gone down on the Signal group, they wouldn’t appear to have concluded that the once liberal-leaning second lady, known to have previously been a registered Democrat, has in any way been muzzled.
“It’s patronizing to say that she’s been silenced,” as one friend told the magazine. “She has chosen this.”
Another classmate, who also asked not to be identified, gave Usha the credit for the politician her husband has become. “She built JD into this creation of the coastal Acela corridor,” the classmate told Vanity Fair, adding: “It’s not an immigrant story; it’s a meritocracy story.”
Others remember a driven student who largely kept her politics to herself. One called her a “gold star chaser” and said: “I never understood why she was trying so hard.”
Deeper in Vanity Fair’s profile, a classmate believes Usha’s hand was involved in her husband’s refusal to condemn white nationalist podcaster Nick Fuentes, who asked in 2024 how a man married to an Indian woman could “support white identity.”
“Usha must have been okay with it,” the friend said, adding that the vice president’s decision to stay quiet about Fuentes “is a choice.”
The classmates’ chosen forum for their clandestine discussions about the second family has its own history in the second Trump administration. In March 2025, The Atlantic’s editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg was accidentally added to a Signal group in which JD Vance and other officials discussed strikes on Yemen.
The Daily Beast has contacted Vance’s office for comment on this story.
