Usha Vance is defending her husband, J.D. Vance, over his now-infamous claim that “childless cat ladies” are running the country. In an interview with Fox News that aired on Monday, Usha downplayed J.D.’s comment as a “quip” taken out of context, CNN reports.
“The reality is he made a quip in service of making a point that he wanted to make that was substantive,” she said in her first solo interview. “I just wish sometimes that people would talk about those things and that we would spend a lot less time just sort of going through this three-word phrase or that three-word phrase.”
To recap, in 2021, J.D. told Tucker Carlson that the U.S. was being run by “childless cat ladies who are miserable in their own lives and the choices that they’ve made” and who “want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.” The comments resurfaced after Donald Trump named J.D. as his running mate, sparking backlash and leading thousands of self-described cat ladies to hold a Zoom supporting Kamala Harris. For his part, Vance has said he stands by his “sarcastic” comment, telling Megyn Kelly that “the substance of what I said, Megyn — I’m sorry, it is true.”
But according to Usha, “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 make it even harder.” She added that J.D. — who has a long history of voicing unhinged ideas about everything from sex and gender to voting rights and divorce — would “never, ever, ever want to say something to hurt someone who was trying to have a family, who really was struggling with that.”
Usha is right about one thing — our policies can make it harder to be a parent in this country. But it would be easier to believe J.D. cared about that if there wasn’t ample evidence that that he doesn’t support policies that help families, like universal child care and protecting IVF — and if he wasn’t out there describing people who don’t have children as “more sociopathic” and responsible for making the country “less mentally stable.”
