When Donald Trump sat down with Laura Ingraham for his latest Fox News interview, the host noted that his running mate has faced criticisms for his comments about Americans who don’t have children. The Republican nominee shrugged it off.
In fact, the former president took the opportunity to insist that Sen. JD Vance is “not against” those without biological kids of their own. Trump added that he’s confident that women “understand” the Ohio senator’s true beliefs. It’s clear, the Republican added, “when you listen to his words.”
The trouble is, we’ve been listening to Vance’s words quite a bit, and they’re not getting any less controversial.
The Ohioan’s first full week as a candidate for national office was quite dreadful for a variety of reasons, but one comment from his record stood out. As we’ve discussed, during Vance’s first campaign for elected office three years ago, the then-Senate candidate appeared on Fox News and diagnosed what he saw as a crisis plaguing the United States. The country, Vance told a national television audience, was being 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.”
The future senator specifically included Vice President Kamala Harris — who has step-children, but no biological children of her own — in his societal condemnation.
The ugliness of Vance’s rhetoric — rooted in the idea that those without biological children are somehow lesser, unreliable, and undeserving of positions of leadership — generated considerable attention, leading the vice presidential candidate to concede his comments were “sarcastic.” But when offered an opportunity to walk back his rhetoric, Vance instead doubled down on the underlying point.
In a separate media appearance last week, the Republican also tried to defend himself by arguing that Harris called for “an end to the child tax credit,” which wasn’t true.
But making matters even worse is the totality of Vance’s record. CNN reported:
Republican vice presidential nominee Sen. JD Vance has a history of making disparaging remarks toward people without children, a CNN KFile review of his comments shows, including fundraising off his now-infamous “childless cat lady” remarks in a series of emails that called Democratic leaders “childless sociopaths” who “don’t have a direct stake in this country.”
As recently as November 2020, for example, Vance said on a podcast that childless Americans, especially those in the country’s “leadership class,” were “more sociopathic” than those with children and made the country “less mentally stable.” Vance went on to say that in his experience, the “most deranged” and “most psychotic” people he sees on social media were also typically childless.
The “childless cat ladies” comments, in other words, were not a one-off. Vance has been condemning Americans without kids repeatedly, for years.
Indeed, it’s been genuinely challenging to keep up with the avalanche of reporting on this, just from the past few days. Media Matters, for example, uncovered several additional Fox interviews in which Vance lashed out at “childless” Democrats. Media Matters also found a Breitbart news interview in which the Ohio Republican claimed that the left’s “next generation leaders,” including “the Kamala Harrises, they don’t have kids. And so there’s this weird way where they want to take our kids and brainwash them so that their ideas continue to exist in the next generation.”
There’s also been extensive reporting of late about Vance suggesting that parents should have greater voting rights than Americans without children, and federal tax policies should “punish” those without children for their “bad” choices.
Mother Jones’ David Corn, meanwhile, uncovered a speech in which Vance said he receives unflattering media coverage because he thinks most journalists are “childless adults.”
Remember, as far as Trump is concerned, Vance is “not against” those without biological kids of their own. All people have to do, the former president said, is “listen to his words.”
I have a follow-up question for the Republican nominee: “Have you listened to his words?”
This post updates our related earlier coverage.
