Usha Vance defends JD Vance’s “childless cat ladies” comment : NPR

Usha Vance, the wife of Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance, mischaracterized her husband’s past comment deriding women without children as “childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives,” as she defended him in a Fox News interview that aired Monday.

“I took a moment to look and actually see what he had said and try to understand what the context was,” Usha Vance said about her husband’s remarks, which he made in a 2021 interview with then-Fox News host Tucker Carlson. “Because what he was really saying is that it can be really hard to be a parent in this country. And sometimes our policies are designed in a way that makes it even harder.”

But that’s not what Vance was claiming. Here is what he told Carlson at the time:

We’re effectively run in this country via the Democrats, via our corporate oligarchs, 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, [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? I just wanted to ask that question and propose that maybe if we want a healthy ruling class in this country, we should invest more, we should vote more.

We should support more people who actually have kids, because those are the people who ultimately have a more direct stake in the future of this country.

While Vance did call for more support for people with children, it was in service of the larger argument that childless Americans aren’t as invested in the country’s success — a claim that was an early centerpiece of Vance’s 2022 U.S. Senate campaign in Ohio.

Recently he called the “cat ladies” remark a “sarcastic comment.”

In Monday’s interview — her first solo one of the campaign — Usha Vance said her husband would never say something to hurt someone trying to have a family, and that she understands that “there are a lot of other reasons why people may choose not to have families, and many of those reasons are very good.”

“I think what I would say is, let’s try to look at the real conversation that he’s trying to have,” she continued. “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? What can we do to make it easier to live in 2024?”

Adjusting to life in the spotlight

Vance also talked about all the changes that come with being part of a major campaign.

She said that her children were excited to pick their Secret Service codenames — but that people should not expect them to have a big presence on the campaign trail.

“Giving them a stable, normal, happy life and upbringing is something that is the most important thing to us,” Vance said. “But I think what we’re going to do is continue to … let them have their lives as children, which I think they really deserve, and let them spend lots of time with their father. And if that’s sometimes seen by other people, great. And if it’s out of their hands, private, great.”

Vance also said that she tried to avoid reading negative press about her husband.

“JD is out there. He’s talking about all sorts of things. He’s thinking all sorts of things. And I just think he deserves to have someone in his life who hears that straight from him and doesn’t just hear what other people are saying about him all the time,” she said.