J.D. Vance’s wife is pushing back against criticism her husband is facing for his “childless cat ladies” remark, saying she wished people wouldn’t focus on the phrase itself.
In a Fox & Friends interview that aired Monday, Usha Vance was asked about the phrase her husband—Donald Trump’s running mate—used during an appearance on Tucker Carlson’s show three years ago in which he accused Democratic political leaders and others of being “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made,” adding that the future of the party “is controlled by people without children.”
“I took a moment to look and actually see what he had said, and try and understand what the context was in all that, which is something that I really wish people would do a little bit more often,” Usha Vance told interviewer Ainsley Earhardt of her reaction to the remarks.
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“The reality is, he made a quip in service of making a point that he wanted to make that was substantive, and it had actual meaning,” she continued. “And I just wish sometimes that people would talk about those things and that we would spend a lot less time just sort of going through this three-word phrase or that three-word phrase, because what he was really saying is that it can be really hard to be a parent in this country.”
Vance added that policies are sometimes “designed” in a way that make being a parent “even harder.” “And we should be asking ourselves, why is that true?” she said. “What is it about our leadership and the way that they think about the world that makes it so hard sometimes for parents? And that’s the conversation that I really think we should have, and I understand why he was saying that.”
Earhardt then asked what Vance would say to women who had been “offended” or “hurt” by her husband’s words.
“I think I would say first of all that J.D. absolutely, at the time and today, would never, ever, ever want to say something to hurt someone who was trying to have a family who really, you know, was struggling with that,” Vance answered. She said she and her husband have “lots of friends who have been in that position,” describing it as “never, ever anything that anyone would want to mock or make fun of.”
Vance added that there are “a lot of other reasons why people may choose not to have families, and many of those reasons are very good.”
“Let’s try to look at the real conversation that he’s trying to have and engage with it and understand,” Vance said. “For those of us who do have families, for the many of us who want to have families and for whom it’s really hard, what can we do to make it better?” she added. “What can we do to make it easier to live in 2024?”
Elsewhere in the interview, Earhardt also asked Vance about J.D.’s previous comments trashing Trump, including describing him as “America’s Hitler.”
“I’ve had several years since then to kind of understand what it is that [Trump] is out to do and, you know, honestly, what J.D. is out to do,” she said. “We have a lot of really good conversations about that. And if I didn’t feel that the ticket—you know, the Trump-Vance ticket—was able to do some real good for the country, then I wouldn’t be here supporting him, and J.D. wouldn’t have done this. So that’s where we are today.”
