Comments made by Donald Trump’s 2021 running mate JD Vance questioning Vice President Kamala Harris’s leadership abilities because she does not have biological children have resurfaced, testing the teenage conservative senator in his early days of campaigning for the Republican presidential ticket.
During Vance’s run for the Ohio Senate, he said in an interview with Fox News that “we are de facto run by the Democrats in this country” and referred to them as “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are unhappy with their own lives and the choices they’ve made and therefore want to make the rest of the country unhappy as well.” He said they included Harris, U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg and U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a Democrat from New York.
“How can it make sense that we’re giving our country over to people who don’t really have a direct stake in it?” Vance asked. Harris became a stepmother to two teenagers when she married entertainment lawyer Douglas Emhoff in 2014. And Buttigieg announced in September 2021 that he and his husband had adopted twins, more than a month before Vance made those comments.
The clip went viral on the internet. Hillary Clinton shared it in a post on X on Tuesday, adding sarcastically: “What a normal, personable guy who certainly doesn’t hate women having freedoms.”
The Harris team disagreed with Vance’s stance, saying “every single American has a stake in the future of this country.”
“Ugly, personal attacks from JD Vance and Donald Trump are consistent with their dangerous ‘Project 2025’ agenda to ban abortion, decimate our democracy and gut Social Security,” said James Singer, a spokesman for the Harris campaign, referring to a policy and personnel plan for a second Trump term drafted by a number of former administration officials. Trump is trying to distance himself from it. Project 2025 says the Department of Health and Human Services should “pursue a robust agenda” to protect “the fundamental right to life.” But the document contains no proposals to cut Social Security, although the Heritage Foundation, which has overseen it, has long pushed for entitlement changes. The plan outlines a dramatic expansion of presidential power and a plan to lay off as many as 50,000 government workers.
A spokesman for Vance said the Harris campaign was lying about Vance’s views, pointing out that her track record was “littered with countless failures and disasters.”
“It is well known that Senator Vance owes his success in life largely to the influence of strong female role models like his grandmother,” said spokeswoman Taylor Van Kirk.
The re-shared comment may be a sign of the party’s struggles to appeal to female voters on the issue of reproductive rights. It follows the explosive entry of Harris into the race, who secured the support of enough delegates to become the official nominee less than 32 hours after President Joe Biden ended his re-election campaign.
It also lays out some of the concerns raised by strategists that Trump took a political risk by choosing a vice president who has served in Congress for less than two years and is untested on a larger stage. Trump liked Vance’s telegenic qualities and said he reminded him of “a young Abraham Lincoln.”
Vance, 39, is a former Marine and businessman who was first elected to public office in 2022. He wrote the 2016 best-seller “Hillbilly Elegy” and developed a sturdy rapport with Trump, his son Donald Trump Jr. and leading MAGA figures. His personal story of growing up in poverty in Appalachia and his mother battling drug addiction could resonate with voters.
One of the most significant questions Vance will face is his stance on abortion. Vance has previously said he would support a federal bill banning abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy, but believes in certain exceptions.
In 2021, Vance floated the idea of allowing parents to vote on behalf of their children. In a speech at the conservative nonprofit Intercollegiate Studies Institute in Virginia, he said that people without children “don’t have as much investment in the future of the country.”
“When you vote as a parent in this country, you should have more power, you should have more opportunity to raise your voice in our democratic republic than people without children,” he said.
“Doesn’t that mean that non-parents have less say than parents?” critics then asked. “Doesn’t that mean that parents have more influence on how a democracy works? Yes, absolutely.”
