Jackie Calmes
Nearly nine years, one presidential term and three campaigns later, Donald Trump’s rare honest words from early 2016 remain all too true: “I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters.”
Trump has never literally tested his claim, of course, but he has tried to overthrow an election, been adjudicated as a sexual abuser and financial fraudster, gotten convicted for 34 felonies, swiped top-secret documents, and said all manner of outrageous things that would doom any other politician. And still he retains enough voters to be a decent bet for reelection.
It turns out, however, that Trump’s Teflon superpower isn’t transferable. In the two weeks since he picked as his running mate J.D. Vance — Trump’s MAGA Mini-Me in just about every respect — Vance has been on the defensive for comments he made before and since becoming Ohio’s junior senator just 19 months ago. By now you know the ones I mean — remarks about the “childless sociopaths” of the ruling class, a.k.a. Democrats, and specifically “childless cat ladies” led by none other than Kamala Harris, now the likely Democratic presidential nominee.
It’s been a disastrous debut, polls confirm: Vance is the least-liked vice-presidential choice in five decades, and the first with a net-negative approval rating.
Yet here’s what’s interesting: Trump is on the defensive for Vance’s inanities, too. It’s a most unfamiliar stance for him. Had Trump made the cat lady crack, it would probably have been soon forgotten, following all his other insults, idiocies, and lies into a memory hole. Trump doesn’t explain his outrages — when you explain, you’re losing, the political truism goes — and he never apologizes. (Which is likely why the sycophantic Vance has only doubled down, with smarmy asides about how he’s “got nothing against cats” that exacerbate and prolong the catty controversy.)
Yet there was Trump on prime-time Fox News Monday evening, the misogynist in chief answering to an otherwise fawning Laura Ingraham for the misogynistic bro-talk of his potential veep. “He loves family,” Trump defended and explained. Well, Ingraham asked, what do you say to women without children? “I think they understand it,” Trump replied meekly.
Yes indeedy. And so do their friends and family, men and women alike. Just not in the way Trump implies.
Perhaps Trump’s Teflon not only isn’t transferable, it’s been nicked and scratched. Perhaps, by choosing Vance as his wingman, he’s finally being held accountable, by proxy, for the outrageous discourse he’s modeled. After all, Vance only started spouting stupidities after he decided to seek political office and needed Trump’s support. To that end, the Yale Law grad, Silicon Valley investor, best-selling author, and former Trump critic morphed into right-wing culture warrior and Trump lickspittle.
I met the former Vance in early 2017 when he came to the University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics to promote his memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy.” He genially fielded questions from David Axelrod, the institute’s founder, before a large audience. Afterward a few of us went to dinner. I mostly recall that Vance was no fan of the newly inaugurated Trump and that he plainly contemplated running for office as a Republican. As a fellow native of Ohio’s working class, I came away thinking that Republicans in our home state would be lucky to have such a self-made, independent-minded pragmatist return as a candidate, and an antidote to Trumpism. Ha.
Vance’s now-infamous cat-lady tirade reveals his cringey transformation — and his sweeping judgmentalism masquerading as fact and deep-thinking:
“We’re effectively run in this country, via the Democrats, 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. And it’s just a basic fact,” he said. “You look at Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, AOC — 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?”
(Buttigieg would announce just weeks afterward that he and his husband had adopted newborn twins, after repeated failed attempts at adoption.)
As it turns out, Vance’s comments, made to then-host Tucker Carlson on Fox News in 2021, were only the latest in a long line of specious societal critiques in speeches and writings dating from his book’s publication in 2016, critiques that grew increasingly nasty and partisan as Vance advanced in Republican politics. In fact, Carlson said he invited Vance on his show because the Senate candidate had made a speech the previous week assailing “the childless left.”
After the show, Vance promoted his comments in fundraising emails. “Fighting back won’t be easy — our childless opponents have a lot of free time,” he snidely wrote in one. In his attacks against the allegedly anti-family Democrats, Vance typically labeled them “sociopaths” and named Harris as the lead avatar. Fact check: Harris years ago became a stepmom to her husband’s two children, and no less than his ex-wife, their mother, attests to Harris’ co-parenting cred.
That Vance’s record of lambasting childless cat ladies is years long, not just a throwaway line to like-minded Carlson, suggests one of two things: Either Trump knew the record and saw no problems there, or his veep vetters missed it.
Whichever it is, here’s the good news: Finally Trump is having to answer for abhorrent remarks, even if they’re not his own, and potentially paying a political price. We can hope.
Jackie Calmes is an opinion columnist for the Los Angeles Times based in Washington, D.C.
