Usha Vance says husband JD knows it’s ‘hard to be a parent,’ brushes off backlash from ‘childless cat ladies’ remark
Usha Vance brushed off criticism of her husband, Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance, on Monday for claiming that Democrats who run the US government were “childless cat ladies,” saying his “quip” underscored the “substantive” truth that it’s “hard to be a parent in this country.”
In a wide-ranging interview with Fox News that aired Monday morning, Usha Vance dismissed critics who tend to seize on “this three-word phrase or that three-word phrase because 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.”
“The reality is, he made a quip in service of making a point that he wanted to make that was substantive,” she explained. “What is it about our leadership and the way that they think about the world that makes it so hard sometimes for parents?”
Asked by “Fox & Friends” co-host Ainsley Earhardt what her message was “to the women who were offended or were hurt by that” remark, Usha Vance firmly responded that her husband “would never, ever, ever want to say something to hurt someone who was trying to have a family.”
“We have lots of friends who have been in that position,” she told Earhardt. “It is challenging and never ever anything that anyone would want to mock or make fun of.”
“And I also understand there are a lot of other reasons why people may choose not to have families, and many of those reasons are very good,” she added, pointing out that JD’s comment was aimed at “those of us who do have families, for the many of us who want to have families and for whom it’s it’s really hard: What can we do to make it better? What can we do to make it easier to live in 2024?”
While acknowledging that it was “hurtful” to have lost some friendships forged during their Yale Law School days together due to their political stances, Usha also said she has “grown a bit of a thick skin” from all the smears leveled at her and her husband are now “in a position of having people speculate about us a lot” who may “draw a lot of conclusions based on sometimes information that isn’t even true.”
“One really good piece of advice that someone gave me is just not to read the news that much,” she recalled, noting that she and JD “come to different conclusions all the time” too and “that’s part of the fun of being married.”
The comment resurfaced and went viral on social media after Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump picked Vance as his running-mate in mid-July at the GOP convention in Milwaukee.
In the unearthed 2021 Fox News interview, Vance had needled “Democrats” and “corporate oligarchs” as “childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives” and who “want to make the rest of the country miserable too.”
“It’s just a basic fact — you look at Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, AOC — the entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children,” he said going further in the exchange with then-Fox News host Tucker Carlson.
“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?” he asked.
The Kamala Harris campaign has slammed Vance for the remark, characterizing his rhetoric in a Sunday press blast as a “crusade against childless cat ladies and women writ large.”
It has also tried to smear Vance as a “weirdo,” to which the Ohio GOP senator has shot back that “the left has increasingly become explicitly anti-child and anti-family.”
In her Fox News interview, Usha Vance said she and her husband had “fun” together filling out his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention with more family anecdotes, saying that they “had a lot of serious conversations” about letting their three kids have “a stable, normal, happy life and upbringing” — despite JD’s meteoric rise since entering the US Senate in 2022.
“I think what we’re going to do is continue to keep them, let them have their lives as children, which I think they really deserve — and let them spend lots of time with their father,” Usha said.
“He’s a wonderful father. He is an excellent husband. He’s my best friend. He is funny. He has all sorts of dorky interests that you know, anyone of our age could relate to you,” she went on when asked about her husband’s best qualities.
“You look at the news sometimes and you just see this caricature of a human,” she lamented. “And I wish that people sometimes would pause and actually listen to the words that he says and try to understand their meaning and their purpose.”
“I think he really cares about having a good conversation about actually changing things for people who have had a very hard time in this country and changing it for the better letting them have the kinds of lives that he’s been lucky enough to have himself,” Usha affirmed. “That’s what I wish people knew about him.”
