Trump Running Mate JD Vance Now Claims His “Childless Cat Ladies” Remarks Were Just “Sarcastic”

I was just 12 when JFK picked LBJ to be his running mate— but I remember it vividly. It wasn’t a popular choice among liberal Democrats but it was excused because it looked like it would be a close race— it was— and that if LBJ could deliver Texas, he could deliver the presidency. He very much did deliver Texas and it’s 24 electoral votes, but despite Nixon’s victory in California and Ohio, Kennedy’s dominance of New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois and Michigan was what was bringing him the electoral college victory. In the end though, Texas’ questionable results helped a lot. LBJ pulled some Rio Grande Valley levers and JFK won the state 1,167,567 (50.5) to 1,121,310 (48.4%). It was a 303 to 219 electoral vote win for JFK with a much closer popular vote— 34,220,984 (49.72%) to 34,108,157 (49.55%).

Since 1960, there probably wasn’t any running mate selection that made a real difference between winning or losing for anyone. Some say that in 2008 there may have been enough swing voters in Ohio, Florida, Virginia, Colorado, Indiana and North Carolina who were so mortified by the lack of judgement that McCain displayed by selecting Sarah Palin that Obama managed his electoral landslide. Other than that though, running mate choices haven’t been even close to decisive. Trump’s foolish decision to select JD Vance is generally agreed to be a misstep but it was really part of a typical Trump base maximumization strategy.

Oddly enough Trump had pretty much settled on relatively inoffensive North Dakota billionaire Doug Burgum when his two pretty stupid sons, Junior and Eric, talked him out of it and got him to pick Vance. Trump has always moaned about what morons his sons— virtually Uday and Qusay— are. If that’s true; he must have forgotten. Betting markets are already taking wagers on whether or not Trump will replace Vance. Yesterday there was an 11% chance he wouldn’t make it to November. 

And Steve Schmidt, the GOP operative who talked McCain into picking Palin (instead of Joe Lieberman), wants everyon to know that Vance is a worse choice than Palin. Yesterday, he wrote that he “always knew it was theoretically possible that Sarah Palin would one day be eclipsed by a candidate more dishonest, fraudulent and weird than her. In the way I know it is possible for aliens to arrive tomorrow, I’ve always known it was possible that one day someone as equally unfit and terrifying could emerge. I just didn’t think I’d live to see it. Yet, here we are in 2024, and the man who believes Putin is our friend and cat ladies are a threat, is poised to be a heartbeat away from the presidency if Donald Trump wins… [H]e has relieved John McCain from the record books for worst pick ever…”

Did anyone vet Vance for Trump? I’m guessing that Trump wouldn’t have minded if someone did and told him Vance is up to his elbows in Project 2025. After all, just about everyone who Trump knows is— although maybe not quite as intimately as Vance is. In 2021 Vance was already saying that if he were to give Señor T one piece of advice “it would be ‘fire every single mid-level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state. Replace them with our people.’… [Now] a purge is the plan. Republicans have long favored hiring more private companies to do government work, but Trump has also taken particular exception to career bureaucrats he blames for blocking his agenda in his first term.”

Trump might be less enthusiastic— though not enough to actually care— that Vance has expressed a desire for higher tax rates for people without children. GOP neo-Nazi Charlie Kirk asked Vance in 2021, “what are you going to do to change this conversation? Everything we have to do should be about moving ideas from unthinkable, to sensible, to popular, to policy.”

In response, Vance, who at the time had not yet officially launched his 2022 Senate campaign, suggested that the country needed to “reward the things that we think are good” and "punish the things that we think are bad”— before suggesting that individuals without children should be taxed at a higher rate than those with children.

“So, you talk about tax policy, let's tax the things that are bad and not tax the things that are good,” Vance said in the interview, which is no longer public on Kirk's channel. “If you are making $100,000, $400,000 a year and you've got three kids, you should pay a different, lower tax rate than if you are making the same amount of money and you don't have any kids. It's that simple.”

Change Research that far more Americans prefer childless woman than prefer JD Vance. “Just 5% of voters hold unfavorable attitudes toward women who are childless by choice; the plurality of voters are, understandably, neutral on this highly personal decision. By contrast, 42% of voters hold unfavorable views on Vance.”

After just a week, many Republicans really wish Trump hadn’t picked Vance. And it isn’t just GOP insiders who feel that sense of buyer’s remorse. “A CNN poll found that Vance was the least liked vice presidential nominee for a non-incumbent following his party’s convention since 1980,” reported Edith Olsted. “Since being nominated last week, Vance has marred the Trump ticket with his awkward jokes about diet soda, sexist comments about ‘childless cat ladies,’ and humiliating rumors about having sex with a couch. Vance has been so embroiled in gaffes, he hasn’t even really gotten to expound on any of his ‘new right’ ideas, such as his phony brand of conservative economic populism, or creepy pronatalism, or terrifying techno-authoritarianism,” which is likely why the techno-authoritarians bought him a place on the ticket.