Backlash over JD Vance’s ‘childless cat lady’ attack on Kamala Harris
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A comment by Donald Trump’s running mate JD Vance that Kamala Harris is a “childless cat lady” has triggered an angry backlash from Democrats.
Mr Vance, 39, who last week accepted the Republican Party’s nomination at its convention in Milwaukee, appeared to have made the comments on at least two occasions three years ago, once during a speech to a conservative think tank and then in an interview with broadcaster Tucker Carlson, when he was still a prime time anchor for Fox News.
“The thing is that we’re effectively run in this country via the Democrats, be it 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,” Vance told Carlson in the recently resurfaced interview from 2021.
“It’s just a basic fact that if you look at Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, AOC [Representative 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?”
The comments from Mr Vance, who has four children, did not appear to have been challenged by Carlson, who left Fox News in April 2023 after he apparently angered Rupert Murdoch, who at the time was still the chair of Fox News.
Democrats have now seized on the discovery of the video to criticise Mr Vance, and claim he is not suitable to be America’s vice-president.
“What a normal, relatable guy who certainly doesn’t hate women having freedoms,” Hillary Clinton, who lost the presidential election to Trump in 2016, wrote sarcastically on X.
Mr Vance, a social conservative who was elected to the Senate from Ohio in 2022, has supported a national ban on abortion and positioned himself to the right of Mr Trump.
As the resurfaced video of Mr Vance emerged, commentators pointed out Ms Harris has two step-children with her husband, second gentleman Doug Emhoff.
Meanwhile Mr Buttigieg, the secretary of transportation, and his husband, Chasten, announced in the summer of 2021 they had adopted twins.
When Senator Vance first made his comments, Ms Ocasio-Cortez attacked him, and referred to him having previously worked in venture capital with billionaire Republican Peter Thiel.
She said: “When you accidentally let your billionaire funder-talk slip out on TV, you say things like ‘a healthy ruling class’.”
