Trump’s VP JD Vance has become the butt of many jokes lately after his comment about miserable cat ladies has resurfaced and gone viral in social media. The comment (and source of many hilarious memes) first surfaced in an interview on Fox News’ “Tucker Carlson Tonight” while JD was campaigning for Ohio’s U.S. Senate seat in 2021.
In the interview he told Carlson that “We are effectively run in this country … by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made, and so they wanna make the rest of the country miserable, too.” Vance added, “It’s just a basic fact. You look at Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, AOC (Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez), the entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children.” Vance ended the interview with stating that people without children don’t have a “direct stake” in the future of this country.
Obviously, cat ladies and old ladies everywhere have not taken such comments well, creating a flurry of hilarious memes and social media posts. For example, actress Glenn Close, who started in the film adaptation of Vance’s book Hillbilly Elegy, posted on Instagram a picture of herself with her Abyssinian cat: “Eve would have left a bleeding mouse head in the bed of anyone who criticized any kind of lady with a CAT!”
Even Kamala Harris’ VP pick Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz had his two cents to add. He told MSNBC’s Stephanie Ruhle recently, “My God, they went after cat people, good luck with that. Turn on the internet and see what cat people do when you go after them.”
Adding insult to injury, Vance lately opined that the main existence of “post-menopausal females” is to help raise the grandkids. In the same breath he thanked his his mother-in-law for baby-sitting his kids which he said is a “weird, unadvertised benefit of marrying an Indian woman.” Vance’s mother-in-law, who took a sabbatical from her role as a biology professor at the University of California, San Diego to help raise Vance’s youngest child at the time.
Vance has three children with his wife, a lawyer, whose parents (her father a mechanical engineer and her mother a molecular biologist) immigrated from India to the U.S.
Vance has also garnered scrutiny for his past suggestions that women should remain in abusive marriages for the sake of their children.
Vance, whose 2022 Senate campaign received $15 million from his previous employer Peter Thiel, tech pioneer, investor and co-founder of PayPal, has been since back-pedaling on his comments. In interviews on CBS, CNN, ABC, Vance said his remarks about cat ladies and the Democratic Party have been distorted, and he alleged that Democrats have made their own remarks that are anti-child and anti-family.
Let’s not ignore the facts. JD Vance has expressed his contempt for women who fail to do their duty to procreate, he has suggested that post-menopausal women are only fit to be baby-sitters, and feels that if you don’t have kids you don’t care about the future. To top it off, his racist comment that the “weird” benefit to marrying an Indian woman means that he gets free child care for his kid should be a red flag for any women who didn’t grow up white.
Aside from the humor and social media backlash regarding Vance’s comments about single cat-ladies and old women baby-sitting their grandkids, one thing is abundantly clear: Such remarks reveal the patriarchal and sexist undertones of the MAGA universe and the what is now the GOP. The reversal of Roe v. Wade, the passage of oppressive abortion laws in multiple states, proposed legislation to track women’s periods and the 2025 plan to outlaw contraception and gender equality are obvious signs that women in America are under attack.
It’s time for childless cat ladies, post-menopausal ladies, and any lady who believes in the right to make her own decisions about her body to go to the polls in November. It’s time to send JD, Trump, the MAGA-verse and the architects of Project 2025 a clear message.