Cat Ladies Are J.D. Vance’s ‘Deplorables’

This piece was first published in our news digest, The Front Page. To get our latest scoops, investigations, and columns in your inbox every morning, Monday through Thursday, become a Free Press subscriber today:

It’s been less than two weeks since the 39-year-old Ohio senator was picked as Trump’s running mate, and it already seems like every single one of his past utterances has been picked apart for damaging details. 

This includes some painfully earnest blog posts from 2010, which, I regret to inform you, include discussion of Zach Braff’s 2004 film Garden State. (We are, only now, coming to realize what it really means to have a millennial on a presidential ticket.) 

It also includes some of Vance’s private messages sent to a transgender friend at Yale Law School from 2014 to 2017. Sofia Nelson, now a public defender in Detroit who is no longer friends with Vance, shared the emails with The New York Times “in the hopes the emails will inform the opinion of voters” about his campaign. (The two apparently fell out in 2021 after Vance backed an Arkansas ban on gender-affirming care for minors.) The story presents Vance as a once empathetic and thoughtful guy who sold his soul to Donald Trump. And they do contain one or two embarrassing lines. Saying “I hate the police,” after Michael Brown, a black 18-year-old was killed by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, for example.

We are supposed to come away thinking that Vance betrayed his friend. But read it and ask yourself who comes across worse. The person who was honest with his friend about their political differences and brought Nelson baked goods after surgery, or the person who went to The New York Times with emails from a former friend?   

Vance’s most self-destructive comments, so far, come from a resurrected 2021 interview with Tucker Carlson. During this exchange, he described prominent Democrats—including Kamala Harris—as “childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives” and who want to “make the rest of the country miserable too.” 

“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?” he added.

As soon as this swipe emerged last week, female feline-lovers of the internet pounced. The hashtag #childlesscatladies became an Instagram meme, complete with merch, and even Jennifer Aniston weighed in, saying, “I truly can’t believe this is coming from a potential VP of the United States.” 

Suddenly, Vance was guilty of the same campaign don’t Hillary Clinton committed in 2016. When she called half of Trump’s supporters “a basket of deplorables” at a fundraising event, his base heard the slight and turned it into a badge of honor, putting it on t-shirts, mugs, and hats.

On Friday, Vance had a chance to walk back his remarks in an interview with Megyn Kelly. And while he dismissed them as “sarcastic” and said he’s “got nothing against cats,” he didn’t back down. “The substance of what I said, Megyn—I’m sorry, it’s true,” he said. “This is about criticizing the Democratic Party for becoming anti-family and anti-children.” In other words, Vance wants us to take him seriously, not literally, when it comes to the cat ladies. (When it comes to “the substance,” Noah Millman notes that George Washington didn’t have any kids. Did that make him a bad president?)

Oliver Wiseman is a writer and editor for The Free Press. Follow him on X @ollywiseman. Read his piece “Kamala the Brat vs. Trump the Macho Man.”