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, onetime 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. (Ms. Vance, who clerked for Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., and was a top editor on The Yale Law Journal, referred to herself at a recent public appearance as a “former lawyer.”) 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 Trump to his running mate, argue that Ms. 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 centerpiece of American life.