Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance told CNN on Sunday that he believes Vice President Kamala Harris “is whatever she says she is” in regard to her racial identity, while also agreeing with his running mate, Donald Trump, that she is a “chameleon.”
“She pretends to be one thing in front of one audience, she pretends to be something different in front of another audience,” Vance said to State of the Union co-anchor Dana Bash. “Look, Dana, she’s not running a political campaign, she’s running a movie.”
Vance’s remarks come after Trump said last month that Harris “happened to turn Black” during an appearance at the National Association of Black Journalists convention.
The Democratic presidential nominee, who is the daughter of a Jamaican father and an Indian mother, has long identified as a Black woman.
Vance also called Harris a “fundamentally fake person” because of her changing positions on policies like fracking, immigration and funding police, saying, “She should have to answer for why she presents a different set of policies to one audience and a different set of policies to another audience.”
Elsewhere, during Vance’s “State of the Union” appearance, Bash asked him about remarks he made in a 2021 interview when he referred to Harris and other Democrats as “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.”
During that interview, he also called Harris, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (Democrat, New York) “people without children.” Harris has stepchildren, and Buttigieg has adopted twins.
Although Vance told Bash that “of course” he recognises Harris and Buttigieg as parents, he said that the vice president is “part of a set of ideas that exist in American leadership that is anti-family” and that she has made some “bizarre statements” in that regard.
“She has said things like it’s reasonable not to have children over climate change,” he said, referencing comments Harris made last year at a college tour stop, where she acknowledged the fear young people have about whether to have children as the climate crisis worsens.
“I think that’s the exact opposite message we should be sending to our young families ... and I think that it’s unfortunate that so much of our public leadership has become anti-family,” Vance added.