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Usha Vance, the wife of Donald Trump’s running mate JD Vance, took to Fox & Friends on Fox News to do some damage control as he faces backlash over his resurfaced comments mocking people without children and criticizing some Democratic politicians as “childless cat ladies.”
The sit-down interview, Usha Vance’s first solo appearance, aired on Monday morning, with the trial lawyer claiming that her husband’s statement was just a “quip.”
His wife insisted in the interview that his remarks — which faced renewed criticism after he joined the ticket as Trump’s vice presidential nominee — were simply about the challenges parents face and what role the government plays in the lives of parents.
“JD, absolutely at the time and today, would never, ever, ever want to say something to hurt someone who was trying to have a family, who really was struggling with that,” Usha Vance told Fox. “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.”
“I took a moment to look and actually see what he had said and tried to understand what the context was and all that which is something that I really wish people would do a little bit more often,” she added.
“The reality is, JD made a quote – I mean, he made a quip, and he made a quip in service of making a point that he wanted to make that was substantive,” she told Fox News. “And I just wish sometimes that people would talk about those things and that we would spend a lot less time just sort of going through this three-word phrase or that three-word phrase.”
“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,” she added.
Usha Vance went on to say that not being able to have children is “challenging,” adding that it’s “never, ever anything that anyone would want to mock or make fun of.”
JD Vance made the “cat lady” comments in 2021 while speaking to then-Fox News host Tucker Carlson. Vance was running for senator in Ohio in the 2022 midterms when he told Carlson that the US was being run 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.”
“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,” he said. “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?”
“A lot of people are unable to have kids for very complicated and important reasons,” JD Vance said at the time. “There are people, of course, for biological reasons, medical reasons, that can’t have children. The target of these remarks is not them.”
During an appearance on The Megyn Kelly Show on SiriusXM, JD Vance said the comments had been “sarcastic,” and he instead moved to attack Democrats for supposedly being “anti-family.”
“Let’s try to look at the real conversation that he’s trying to have and engage with it and understand for those of us who do have families, for the many of us who want to have families, and for whom it’s really hard, what can we do to make it better,” Usha Vance said in the Monday interview.
