The View‘s Alyssa Farah Griffin slammed Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance over his latest unearthed comments about women, though the Ohio senator said his words were twisted.
During a podcast interview in 2020, Vance seemingly agreed with the host that the “purpose of postmenopausal women” in society was to serve as doting grandmothers. Vance shared that his mother-in-law lived with his family for a year after his wife gave birth—something the host called a “weird, unadvertised feature of marrying an Indian woman.”
Vance said that his mother-in-law, a biology professor, took a sabbatical to do so. He said that grandparents taking time off work for the purpose of helping their children was “painfully economically inefficient.”
Griffin reposted the clip shared by Heartland Signal on X, formerly Twitter, writing on August 14: “*shouts into void* Can men please stop analyzing women’s value to society based around their fertility/ menstruation/ if they have kids?”
A spokesperson for Vance accused the media of twisting the Ohio senator’s words in a statement to Newsweek.
“The media is dishonestly putting words in JD’s mouth – of course he does not agree with what the host said,” Taylor Van Kirk said.
“JD reacted to the first part of the host’s sentence, assuming he was going to say: ‘that’s the whole purpose of spending time with grandparents.’
“It’s a disgrace that the media is lying about JD instead of holding Kamala Harris accountable for her policies that caused sky high prices for groceries and everyday necessities, a disaster at the southern border, and a historic drug overdose epidemic.”
Dominik Bindl/Getty Images, Adam Bettcher/Getty Images
Griffin, who was a White House aide in the Trump administration, previously warned that Vance’s “radioactive” comments could hurt the Republican Party at the ballot box.
One comment that gained traction was from a 2021 interview Vance did with Fox News. The then-Senate hopeful said that under the Democratic administration, the country was being run by “childless cat ladies.”
“We are 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, so they want to make the country miserable too,” Vance said.
He faced intense scrutiny for the comments, and he later defended them, saying they were not “about criticizing people” who do not have children but were about “criticizing the Democratic Party for becoming anti-family and anti-child.”
But Griffin believed that despite Vance trying to clear the air, the damage had already been done.
“This cat lady comment has just really stuck in a way that I haven’t seen with many things in politics,” Griffin said during an appearance on CNN‘s The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer earlier this month.
“And the Trump news cycle, things tend to move rapidly. But with JD Vance, this has become like a 3-week-long story, and it’s genuinely hurting him with a demo that he needs the most—suburban women,” she said. “It’s just radioactive.”
Farah Griffin also added that more of Vance’s comments were likely to emerge on the campaign trail because “there just fundamentally was no vetting of JD Vance before he was added to the ticket.”
“And this will not be the last comment that we see that is very radioactive with independents needed to win this election,” she said.