Women offended by JD Vance’s contention that the US is run by “childless cat ladies” should realise it was merely a “quip”, the Republican vice-presidential nominee’s wife, Usha Vance, claimed in an interview broadcast on Monday.
“I took a moment to look and actually see what he had said and tried to understand what the context was and all that, which is something that I really wish people would do a little bit more often,” Vance told Fox News in remarks that doubled down on a controversy that has emerged as one of her husband’s most persistent.
“And the reality is, he made a quip in service of making a point that he wanted to make that was substantive and had actual meaning. And I just wish sometimes that … we would spend a lot less time just sort of going through this three-word phrase or that three-word phrase.”
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But JD Vance’s three-word phrase lies at the heart of his rocky rollout as Donald Trump’s running mate.
Speaking in 2021, a year shy of election to the US Senate in Ohio and when best known as the author of the bestseller Hillbilly Elegy, Vance told the then Fox News host Tucker Carlson that the US was run by “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.
“It’s just a basic fact – you look at [vice-president] Kamala Harris, [US transportation secretary] Pete Buttigieg, AOC [congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez] – the entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children. And how does it make any sense that we’ve turned our country over to people who don’t really have a direct stake in it?”
Buttigieg now has children, adopted with his husband, Chasten, in 2021.
Vance has come under sustained fire over a host of allegedly misogynistic remarks, including about women who choose not to have children or cannot have them at all.
Harris, a stepmother of two, is now the Democratic nominee for president, preparing to name her own running mate to face Trump and Vance.
On Fox and Friends, Usha Vance – who has three children – insisted her husband “was really saying … that it can be really hard to be a parent in this country and sometimes our policies are designed in a way that make it even harder”.
She did not mention, and was not asked about, her husband’s support for a national abortion ban (having even compared abortion to slavery), or his presence among Senate Republicans who blocked a bill to establish the right to in-vitro fertilisation (IVF), a treatment that helps millions of Americans who might otherwise not be able to have children.
In a recent statement, Aida Ross, a spokesperson for the Democratic National Committee, said: “Trump and Vance’s extreme … agenda wouldn’t just ban abortion nationwide with or without Congress – it would also threaten access to IVF for millions of women. Vance can try to cover for his anti-choice record all he wants, but the American people see through the spin.”
Usha Vance insisted that with his “childless cat ladies” remark, her husband had really meant to say: “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 that we should have and I understand why he was saying that.”
Asked what she would say to women “hurt or offended” by her husband’s remarks – prominently including the actor Jennifer Aniston – Vance said: “I think I would say first of all that JD 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 was really struggling with that. And he made that clear at the time, and he’s made that clear today.
“And we have lots of friends who have been in that position. It is challenging and never ever anything that we want to mock or make fun of.
“And I also understand there are a lot of other reasons why people may choose not to have families, and many of those reasons are very good.”
Vance was also asked about another controversy affecting her husband – that over remarks in which he said: “I hate the police.”
“JD certainly does not hate the police,” Vance said, though she added: “He maybe had a negative interaction once or twice and made a remark like that, I don’t know.”
The former friend to whom Vance made the remark, Sofia Nelson, now a public defender in Detroit, is transgender.
Related: JD Vance calls Trump ‘morally reprehensible’ in resurfaced emails
Last year, Vance introduced the Protect Children’s Innocence Act, a law to stop minors accessing puberty blockers, hormone therapy and other transition-related care.
Nelson attended Yale law school with JD and Usha Vance and attended their wedding in 2014. Back then, Usha Vance was a registered Democrat.
Nelson recently gave her correspondence with JD to the New York Times, which added it to evidence of his former distrust and dislike for Trump.
“He achieved great success and became very rich by being a Never Trumper who explained the white working class to the liberal elite,” Nelson told the Times. “Now he’s amassing even more power by expressing the exact opposite.”
Usha Vance told Fox: “It is hard to know that sometimes politics comes in the way of friendships.”
