Is Usha Vance okay?

I’ve met Usha, but I don’t really know her. We were summer associates together for a few months when we were both in law school, and then we followed similar career trajectories: a clerkship on the D.C. Circuit, a clerkship on the Supreme Court, a job at a fancy law firm. I didn’t develop a strong impression of her in any of these places, but she seemed kind and capable and bookish. We could have been friends, maybe.

But now she’s married to JD Vance, Trump’s pick for vice president and the author of the best-selling book Hillbilly Elegy. I cannot tell you how abhorrent I find JD. To the extent he has principles—which I think is up for debate, giving his flip-flopping on Trump (and this recent comment, which is so internally inconsistent that it actually made me lol)—I disagree with them. JD is a climate change denier. He is pro-January 6 and supports Trump’s claims that the 2020 election was stolen. He is anti-choice, anti-LGBTQ+ rights, anti-gun control laws, anti-Black Lives Matter, anti-solar power, anti-electric vehicle, and anti-being child-free, especially if the child-free person is a woman with cats. “These cat ladies, man,” he tweeted in 2021. “They must be stopped.”

In many ways, JD Vance isn’t very interesting. He’s just one more virulently ambitious, straight, white, male, aggrieved, Ivy League-educated lawyer (VASWMAILEL). They’re a dime a dozen, let me tell you, and almost all of them are equally obnoxious, regardless of their political affiliations. Most of them are in DC, reminiscing about being high school class president, wearing the boring khakis of people thinking of their future confirmation hearings, and feeling slighted over something.

But JD’s wife, Usha, interests me. She is smart. She brings in a good income (or did until she quit her law firm job yesterday). She doesn’t need to be married to anyone. Why is she with JD? Is she happy? How did she go from being a registered Democrat in 2014 to this? Is this a Stockholm syndrome situation?

I have no inside intelligence, and no journalist has yet sat Usha down and asked her how she got here. But in a not-so-far-fetched alternative reality, I could have wound up just like her—I certainly dated a number of politically ambitious (albeit ostensibly liberal) VASWMAILELs—so let me offer some thoughts, which may be insightful or pure projection.

First, if you’re a smart woman, you can feel like a freak. Maybe this is different now, but I think it was broadly true in the 1980s, when Usha and I were children. I love my intelligence, but it sometimes makes me feel weird. For a while when I was younger, I wanted to feel normal. And if you want to feel normal, what better way than partnering with the great standard-bearer of normalcy, the most heteronormative figure there is: a straight, white, male lawyer? You can feel grateful to these bastions of the mainstream for providing you an entree into their culture.

Unfortunately, their culture mostly sucks, especially for women. These days, when I look back on my own relationships with VASWMAILELs, I think: how in the world did I tolerate them??? They were such bad fits. These relationships profoundly embarrass me—worse, I find them reprehensible, a betrayal of myself and my values. I advanced the careers of men whose approaches to gender deserve condemnation.

But that’s a perspective that I gained only once I was out of these relationships, when I was able to reestablish my own equilibrium rather than catering to theirs. Politician types can be extremely charismatic—it can feel so flattering to have their attention! But they can also be terrifying and manipulative, and you can feel like you must please them . . . or else. While I was still dating such people, I tried my hardest to make things work because I thought I had to. It’s psychologically useful to believe you are with a good person when you feel you cannot leave.

Second, I think it’s unfortunately true that part of “succeeding” as a woman is still broadly seen as marrying a “successful” guy. If you’re committed to succeeding within our society’s norms—and people who go to Ivy League law schools are generally quite committed to succeeding within our society’s norms—then you might well wind up with a VASWMAILEL. Law school is full of them; you can forget there are other types of people altogether. And in lawyer-land, you get a lot of social accolades for being with a VASWMAILE. Pats on the head can feel really good, and they can also really distract you from following your own internal compass.

Third, if you’re a smart lawyer lady, you may want an equal in a partner. So why not date a smart lawyer gent? It seems like a good solution, but I think these two sets of people are more dissimilar than they first appear: We’ve had ambitious male lawyers as long as we’ve been a country; lawyering is fundamentally a very traditional path for men. An ambitious female lawyer, however, is not so traditional—a rule-follower in other ways, perhaps, but still a relatively novel development. When these two seemingly similar people get together, tension can follow. In my experience, VASWMAILELs tend to have extremely regressive views on gender in their intimate relationships. They assume that their own professional, geographic, social, and familial preferences should take precedence. But that conflict doesn’t usually arise until the relationship is well under way—and by then, a person might feel stuck.

Fourth, it’s possible that JD misrepresented himself at the outset of their relationship. I remember learning, two years into a relationship, that the reason my then-partner made the bed every morning was not (as I’d assumed) out of respect for me or us, but because he loved Jordan Peterson. I also belatedly learned that this partner was anti-choice and pro-Amy Coney Barrett, and this was at a time when I was doing a lot of abortion litigation. Not great! Who knows how JD presented himself to Usha at the outset of their relationship.

Finally, we can all be frogs in boiling water. Things change little by little, and then you wake up after a decade and you’re married to someone you never would have agreed to date. That’s part of the beauty of marriage: the person you marry will inevitably change, and you’re pledging to stand by them through it all. It’s a very romantic notion.

But that notion can also be problematic. If it were possible to ask the version of Usha that existed in 2010 (the year we both entered law school) whether she would choose to marry someone with JD’s politics, I wonder what she’d say. Mostly, though, I just hope she is okay. I wasn’t, when I was in shoes like hers. And I wouldn’t wish those shoes—the sensible, low-heeled pumps of a trailing political spouse—on anyone. They’re ugly and uncomfortable. They can kill your spirit. They can kill you altogether.

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Other things that interested me recently:

• I just found out about this cat, Truffles, who wears glasses at an optometrist’s office to help kids feel more comfortable with their four eyes.

• A conservative group filed a complaint alleging that Northwestern Law School unlawfully discriminates against straight, white male faculty members. The school’s faculty is 83% white & 53% male, but the complainants are not deterred! Their complaint is fully of unabashedly racist and sexist statements. It says that Northwestern’s female, non-straight, and Black faculty members are “far less capable and far less accomplished” than their white male counterparts. It identifies some Black faculty members by name and says they were “lazy,” “mediocre and undistinguished,” and/or had “below-average academic” records. Absolutely appalling—and probably a harbinger of other lawsuits we’ll see soon, now that the Supreme Court has banned affirmative action in college admissions.

• Oof that ProPublica story on Ziklag.

• I finally read the order addressing the complaint filed against Alaska federal district court judge Joshua Kindred. Kindred discussed his sex life with clerks, sent them explicit text messages, and engaged in a sexual relationship with one of them. This behavior is abhorrent. It’s a testament to how bad things are in the legal profession that, when I read this order, I could think of many people who had behaved similarly.