Donald Trump’s running mate, Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH), continued to play clean-up Sunday evening after a series of comments resurfaced in which he criticized those without children as insufficiently invested in the future of America and called Democratic politicians a “bunch of childless cat ladies with miserable lives.”
Vance appeared on Fox News’ Sunday Night in America With Trey Gowdy to address the controversy, with Gowdy himself saying he’s been contacted by many people who were “disappointed” in the senator’s comments.
In response, Vance claimed his comments were taken out of context and that he simply meant to criticize Democrats for their rhetoric toward parents. He specifically pointed to another resurfaced interview in which Kamala Harris, the presumptive Democratic nominee, said one of the things Americans are forced to consider when deciding to have children is the way climate change may impact their lives.
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“The left has increasingly become explicitly anti-child and anti-family, and they encouraged young families not to have children at all over concerns of climate change, and they suggested people having children are somehow being selfish, when being a parent is the most selfless thing that you can do,” he said. “This is not a criticism and never was a criticism of everybody without children—that is a lie of the left. It’s a criticism of the increasingly anti-parent and anti-child attitude of the left.”
He then went on to criticize Harris’ policies of harming parents, while falsely accusing her of seeking to cut the child tax credit. She has previously expressed support for the policy, which was expanded significantly under the Biden administration as part of the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) in 2021.
“I think a lot of parents and a lot of non-parents look at the public policy over the last four years and ask, ‘How did we get to this place? How did we get to a place where Kamala Harris is calling for an end of the child tax credit?’” Vance said.
“How do we get to a place where we were masking toddlers years into the pandemic? I think it’s because we radically under-represent the perspective of parents in our public discourse.”
Trump’s vice presidential pick also doubled down on his “childless cat ladies” rant Friday in an interview with conservative commentator Megyn Kelly, during which he called the comment “sarcasm.”
“People are focusing so much on the sarcasm and not on the substance, and the substance of what I said, Megyn—I’m sorry, it is true,” Vance said.
The resurfaced comments have inspired pushback from across the political spectrum—including from a number of high-profile women in the entertainment industry, including Jennifer Aniston, who has been open about her own fertility struggles.
He was also the target of an unflattering op-ed by the ultra-conservative editorial board of Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal Saturday, in which the newspaper compared Vance’s “cat lady” remark to Hillary Clinton’s infamous “basket of deplorables” quote.
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, a rising Democratic star who has seemingly emerged out of nowhere as one of Harris’ most effective surrogates both on cable news and on the campaign trail, leveled one of the most enduring attacks against Trump and Vance in recent days when he called them “weird people” on MSNBC this week and then again at an event in St. Cloud, Minnesota on Saturday.
Even Harris’ campaign has begun to test-drive the message.
It was an attack that Vance clearly took issue with.
On Sunday, he tweeted out a video of Harris giving her pronouns before a town hall event on CNN in 2020, accompanied by the caption “J.D. Vance is weird.”
