Usha Vance defends husband's 'childless cat ladies' comment as a 'quip' in first solo interview

Usha Vance introduces her husband, Republican vice-presidential nominee JD Vance, at the Republican National Convention in July 2024. (Justin Lane / EPA-EFE / Shutterstock via CNN Newsource)

Usha Vance, the wife of Republican vice-presidential nominee JD Vance, defended her husband’s previous comments deriding childless adults and downplayed his labelling of some Democratic politicians as “childless cat ladies,” calling it a “quip.”

In a sit-down interview with Fox News that aired Monday, Usha Vance, a trial lawyer, argued her husband’s past comments, which have received renewed scrutiny since he joined former president Donald Trump’s presidential ticket, were in service of an argument about the challenges facing parents and the role government plays in parents’ lives.

“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 said. “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 continued.

The first solo interview from Usha Vance comes alongside fresh urgency for the Republican senator to quickly change the conversation around his candidacy. Trump allies have been eager to see Usha Vance defend her husband and the Republican ticket publicly as the campaign continues its defence of different resurfaced clips of JD Vance.

His past remarks have attracted ire from celebrity icons and Taylor Swift supporters but also from conservative outlets. The Wall Street Journal editorial board eviscerated Vance’s comments as the “sort of smart-aleck crack that gets laughs in certain right-wing male precincts.” Conservative commentator Ben Shapiro wondered out loud to his sizable audience if Trump was having doubts about his pick.

In her interview with Fox, Usha Vance said she believes her husband “would never” intend to offend people who are struggling to have children while acknowledging that some people choose not to start families for “very good” reasons.

“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,” she said. “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.”

Usha Vance insisted that her husband, who repeatedly made disparaging comments about childless adults in interviews, campaign appearances and fundraising emails while targeting Democratic officials, was attempting to have “a real conversation” about how government can help parents raise their children.

A CNN KFile review of multiple similar remarks from JD Vance underscores how the “childless cat ladies” comment was part of a broader pattern of him pressing the culture war by, in part, singling out Democratic leaders for not having children.

In November 2020, for example, JD Vance said on a conservative podcast that childless Americans, especially those in the country’s “leadership class,” were “more sociopathic” than those with children and made the country “less mentally stable.” Vance added that the “most deranged” and “most psychotic” commentators on Twitter – now known as X - were typically childless.

“Let’s try to look at the real conversation that he’s trying to have,” Usha Vance said, “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.”

Vance says she’s come to ‘understand’ Trump

Usha Vance also pushed back on reports that both she and her husband privately condemned Trump before JD Vance joined Trump on the Republican ticket.

In the interview, Vance appeared to confirm a Washington Post report detailing her outrage towards Trump in the wake of the January 6, 2021 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, but said that she has grown to “understand” Trump since then.

“Well, you know, I’ve had several years since then to kind of understand what it is that he is out to do,” Vance said of Trump. “If I didn’t feel that the ticket, you know, the Trump-Vance ticket was able to do some real good for the country, then I wouldn’t be here supporting him and JD wouldn’t have done this.”

Vance said that she and her husband sometimes disagree about political issues, acknowledging “we’re two different people,” but said she believes in the “intention” behind his political career.

“We have lots of different backgrounds and interests and things like that. So we come to different conclusions all the time. But that’s part of the fun of being married,” she said. “What I never doubt about JD, even when I disagree about this or that, is his intention, what it is that he really wants to do.”

Vance also defended her husband’s private exchanges with a law school friend published in a New York Times article in which he disparaged Trump and said “I hate the police.” Vance denied her husband hates the police and said her husband’s friend sharing their personal correspondence publicly was “hurtful.”

“JD certainly does not hate the police. I think that is clear through his career, and before,” she said. “Maybe he had a negative interaction once or twice and made a, you know, remark like that. I don’t know. But since then, and always as long as I’ve known him, he’s had a great deal of respect for them and everything they do to keep us safe.”

“We’ve both been in a position of having people speculate about us a lot and make – draw a lot of conclusions based on sometimes information that isn’t even true,” she said of the New York Times report. “And I don’t want to do the same about other people.”