WASHINGTON — Vice President JD Vance is calling his resurfaced screed against “childless cat ladies” that went viral during the 2024 election “one of the dumbest things I ever said,” according to pages from his forthcoming memoir.
In “Communion,” Vance takes responsibility for the “boneheaded comment” but notes that it had succeeded in provoking people, as intended.
“One of the dumbest things I ever said came when I argued that ‘childless cat ladies’ across the Democrat Party were running our country into the ground,” Vance writes in his second memoir, according to NBC News.
“The comment caused two firestorms: the first when I made it, the second years later during a political campaign,” he also says. “It was a boneheaded comment, intentionally (and successfully) provocative rather than illuminating.”
The future vice president was a guest on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show in 2021 when he first lashed out at the female-feline community, but the remarks were unearthed during his run with President Trump since they had been made about Democratic nominee Kamala Harris.
“We are effectively run in this country — via the Democrat [Party], 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,” Vance told Carlson.
“If you look at Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, AOC, the entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children,” he said.
Pop superstar Taylor Swift later dubbed herself a “Childless Cat Lady” as a badge of honor when endorsing Harris and her running-mate, Minnesota Democratic governor Tim Walz.
Vance’s book which focuses on his conversion to Catholicism is out on Tuesday.
