Remarks by Ohio senator emerge as Trump attempts to soften VP pick’s ‘childless cat ladies’ comment
JD Vance reportedly admitted to Republican donors this weekend that Kamala Harris was a threat and a “sucker punch”, the latest in a string of recent and past remarks that have been seen to undermine the campaign and that led Donald Trump to try to soften his vice-presidential pick’s description of Democrats as “childless cat ladies”.
The leaked remarks about Harris were themselves quickly followed on Tuesday by the publication of a previously unseen video of Vance telling an interviewer that not having “kids in your life” makes “people more sociopathic” and makes the US a little bit “less mentally stable”.
“You go on Twitter, and almost always, the people who are most deranged and most psychotic are people who don’t have kids at home,” he added in the video, which was released by the Kamala Harris campaign and is undated.
The recorded audio of Vance telling donors at a fundraiser in Golden Valley, Minnesota, on Saturday that “all of us were hit with a little bit of a political sucker punch” when the president, Joe Biden, withdrew from the 2024 race was leaked to the Washington Post.
“The bad news is that Kamala Harris does not have the same baggage as Joe Biden, because whatever we might have to say, Kamala is a lot younger,” the newspaper reported Vance saying. “And Kamala Harris is obviously not struggling in the same ways that Joe Biden did.”
The comments contradict Trump’s own statements on Harris since Biden withdrew from the race. Earlier this month Trump told Bloomberg that he did not think switching out Biden for Harris “would make much difference”, adding: “I would define her in a very similar [way] that I define him.”
On Monday evening, in an interview with Fox News’s Laura Ingraham, Trump said he thought Harris was a “worse candidate” than Biden. And just over a week ago, the Washington Post reported that Vance himself told reporters that there was in effect no difference in running against Biden versus Harris.
As the audio of Vance was leaked on Monday evening, Trump was on Fox News, defending Vance’s past comments that have recently resurfaced about “childless cat ladies”, saying that Vance was simply trying to show how much he values family life.
Vance’s 2021 comments criticizing Harris and other Democrats as “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives” resurfaced after Trump selected the Ohio senator as his running mate earlier this month.
The comments prompted a backlash and warnings from some political strategists that they could cost the Trump campaign valuable votes in a close election.
“He grew up in a very interesting family situation, and he feels family is good. And I don’t think there’s anything wrong in saying that,” Trump said in an interview on Fox News with Laura Ingraham that aired on Monday.
Trump also said in the interview that he did not place a higher value on people with families.
“You know, you don’t meet the right person, or you don’t meet any person. But you’re just as good, in many cases, a lot better than a person that’s in a family situation,” Trump said.
Harris has two stepchildren with her husband, the lawyer Doug Emhoff, and Vance, who was brought up in Ohio, was largely raised by his grandmother.
Other videos of Vance criticizing Democrats and the Democratic party and those within it have surfaced in recent days.
In one newly surfaced interview with Fox News in 2021, identified by the progressive media watchdog Media Matters for America, Vance said that the “left feels comfortable experimenting on children with the lockdowns, the mask mandates and just their general approach to public policy, because they’re increasingly the party in the movement that doesn’t have kids”.
He later added: “I think basically what we’ve done is that we’ve allowed the Democrats to become dominated by a bunch of sociopaths who don’t care about America’s children. And we just need to call it out.”
