Andrea Austria / Media Matters
Written by Matt Gertz
Published
Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance is using a right-wing media tour to clean up the firestorm over his remark that the country is run by “childless cat ladies” who “don't really have a direct stake” in its future.
It isn’t going well.
Vance claimed that Vice President Kamala Harris and other Democrats don’t have “a direct stake” in the country because they don’t have biological children during a July 29, 2021, interview on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News program:
JD VANCE: We're effectively run in this country … 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.
And it's just a basic fact. You look at Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, AOC — 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?
Mimicking Carlson’s cruel affect, weird obsessions, and unhinged misogyny helped Vance win support for his Senate campaign from the Fox star and his viewers, and he made similar comments to other right-wing audiences at the time. But the Carlson clip resurfaced after Vance became former President Donald Trump’s running mate, exposing his message to the broader public and triggering a wave of revulsion.
Vance’s attempts to curtail the political damage — through even more interviews with pro-Trump pundits — are further exposing the dangers of his reliance on the right-wing bubble.
Vance’s first try at rebutting his critics, on former Fox host Megyn Kelly’s streaming show, was a debacle. He claimed to have been making a “a sarcastic comment,” joking that he has “nothing against cats,” as if that had been the real concern with his remark. And he lashed out at the actress Jennifer Aniston, who has publicly discussed her struggles with fertility and criticized Vance’s “childless cat ladies” comment, calling her response “disgusting.”
Video: JD Vance attacked Jennifer Aniston as “disgusting” after the movie star reacted to his “childless cat ladies” remarks.
Vance also implied Aniston had creepy thoughts toward his 2 year-old daughter pic.twitter.com/Ub113nKvQ1— PatriotTakes 🇺🇸 (@patriottakes) July 26, 2024
Attacking celebrities plays well within the right-wing bubble, where cultural resentment makes for great content. But outside of it, politicians who don’t wish to cultivate reputations as off-putting weirdos generally try to avoid generating headlines about their feuds with a star of Friends.
The Trump campaign apparently recognized that Vance’s Kelly interview had failed to stop the bleeding because he took another shot at it with a Sunday night appearance on former GOP congressman Trey Gowdy’s Fox show. But Gowdy wouldn’t defend Vance’s remark; he led into the interview by pointing out that Catholic nuns don’t have children but “love this country, living lives of service to others,” and declared that “some of the finest people I know don’t have children.”
When Vance came on, he did not defend what he had actually said on Carlson’s show. Instead, he effectively repudiated that argument, while claiming that he had made a different, less callous and vicious one but been taken out of context by Democrats.
Citation
From the July 28 edition of Fox News' Sunday Night in America.
Gowdy asked Vance whether he agrees “that there are people who very much love this country and are invested in its future, but they also happen to be childless.”
“Oh, of course I believe that, Trey,” Vance replied. “And if you look at the full context of what I said, it's very clear the Democrats have tried to take this thing out of context and blow it out of proportion.”
After Gowdy asked Vance if he agreed that “direct offspring are not necessary to be fully invested in the future of this country,” Vance said he did, before offering an entirely different argument that he falsely claimed to have been making on Carlson’s show.
JD VANCE: I do think that being a parent actually has a profound effect on somebody's perspective and we should honor and respect that. But there are a whole host of people who don't have children for a whole host of reasons. And they certainly are great people who can participate fully in the life of this country. And that's not what I said, Trey.
If you look at what the left has done, they have radically taken this out of context and, in fact, aggressively lied about what I've said. What I do think is true, Trey, and this goes to the heart of what I was talking about three years ago in those comments but it's going to be something I continue to talk about, is that the left has increasingly become explicitly anti-child and anti-family.
This is nonsense.
If Vance had told Carlson that “being a parent actually has a profound effect on somebody's perspective and we should honor and respect that” but that people don’t have children for a host of reasons and can still be “great people who can participate fully in the life of this country,” it wouldn’t have appealed to Carlson’s audience in 2021 — or caused such a devastating public outcry when it resurfaced last week.
But that’s not what Vance said. He told Carlson that “the entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children” and that it does not “make any sense that we've turned our country over to people who don't really have a direct stake in it.” He did not offer any rhetorical carve-outs for those who might wish to have children but struggle to find a partner, or with fertility, or with the adoption system. And he included Harris, who has two stepchildren, among the “childless cat ladies” who he claimed lack “a direct stake” in the country.
Since it’s not politically viable to defend what he actually said, Vance is pretending that he was making a critique of Democrats over “anti-child” policies. But because that’s not true, he has to make up Democratic positions to get mad about.
“How did we get to a place where Kamala Harris is calling for an end to the child tax credit?” he asked on Gowdy’s show. The answer is we didn't — Harris broke ties in the Senate to help pass the American Rescue Plan in 2021, which included a sizable but temporary increase in child tax cut payments that helped cut the rate of child poverty to record lows, and she repeatedly supported extending the expanded payments “because our children deserve every opportunity to thrive."
Vance acted the right-wing culture war bomb-thrower when he thought it was politically beneficial — and now that the broader public has glimpsed his weird behavior and recoiled, he’s retreated back within the right-wing media bubble to lie about it.