Pete Buttigieg Calls Out JD Vance at the DNC—One Veteran to Another

Pete Buttigieg used a good chunk of his speech at the Democratic National Convention on Wednesday to criticize Donald Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, over his attacks on Americans without children.

The Ohio senator previously claimed that the “childless left” have “no physical commitment to the future of this country”—a sentiment the transportation secretary rebuked by invoking his wartime deployment to Afghanistan. He assured the DNC crowd that the tour was “pretty damn physical.”

Buttigieg, who was in the Middle Eastern country for seven months in 2014 as a member of the Navy Reserve, said that even though he had no children at the time, that didn’t mean he was any less committed to his country.

Vance, he said, “is one of those guys who thinks if you don’t live the life he has in mind for you, then you don’t count.”

Buttigieg then recalled Vance’s 2021 comments. Vance, he quoted, was “someone who said if you don’t have kids, you have ‘no physical commitment to the future of this country.’”

Buttigieg then directly addressed Vance, a former Marine who deployed to Iraq for six months in 2005 and worked in the Public Affairs office.

“You know, senator,” Buttigieg said, “when I deployed to Afghanistan, I didn’t have kids then. Many of the men and women who went outside the wire with me didn’t have kids either. But let me tell you: Our commitment to the future of this country was pretty damn physical.”

Vance made similar controversial comments in 2020, as CNN noted recently. That year, he claimed on a right-wing podcast that the “most deranged” and “most psychotic” users of Twitter, now known as X, generally didn’t have children.

That’s on top of Vance criticizing “childless cat ladies”—a remark that drew backlash from many, including Jennifer Aniston and billionaire media mogul Oprah Winfrey, who made a dig about the comment during her own DNC speech Wednesday.

Later in his speech, Buttigieg contrasted Kamala Harris’ campaign with Donald Trump’s, which he said is filled with “negativity and grievance.” A second Trump term, he added, would only amplify that.

“I don’t presume to know what it is like in your kitchen,” Buttigieg said, “but I know, as sure as I’m standing here, that everything in it—the bills that you pay at that table, the shape of the family that sits there, their fears and dreams that you talk about late into the night—all of it compels us to demand more from our politics then a rerun of some TV wrestling death match.”