Donald Trump’s vice presidential running mate, JD Vance, drew high-profile backlash this week for his remark in 2021 about top Democrats, such as Vice President Kamala Harris, being “childless cat ladies.”
The View co-host Whoopi Goldberg slammed Vance with a “how dare you” on Wednesday morning’s broadcast, and former Friends star Jennifer Aniston made a rare political statement later that day.
“I truly can’t believe this is coming from a potential VP of The United States,” Aniston said on Instagram. “All I can say is...Mr Vance, I pray that your daughter is fortunate enough to bear children of her own one day.”
Kerstin Emhoff, a film producer and the ex-wife of second gentleman Doug Emhoff, called the comments “baseless attacks,” pointing out on Thursday that Harris has for years been a co-parent of their children.
“She is loving, nurturing, fiercely protective and always present,” Kerstin Emhoff told CNN. “I love our blended family and am grateful to have her in it.”
The Trump-Vance campaign hasn’t responded to the criticism.
In 2021, Vance blasted the “childless left” in a speech, arguing that people without children have less of a stake in the country’s future. He followed the speech with an incendiary interview on Fox News in which he specifically mentioned Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg and Harris.
“We’re effectively run in this country, via the Democrats, 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, now a US senator from Ohio, said at the time.
“It’s just a basic fact: You look at Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, AOC, 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 that don’t have a direct stake in it?”
The remarks drew wider attention after Trump named Vance as his running mate last week.
In case anyone missed it, on Thursday the Harris campaign posted a clip of the interview to its one million followers on X, the website formerly known as Twitter. And in an email heralding World IVF Day, the Harris campaign said Vance “is driving away voters in droves, insulting couples struggling with infertility who are sounding off on his disparaging comments about ‘childless’ women.”
In vitro fertilisation emerged as a major political issue this year after an Alabama Supreme Court decision put IVF procedures on shaky legal footing. The decision followed the US Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v Wade, the federal right to an abortion, and put Republicans on the defensive. Trump has insisted his would defend IVF if he’s elected president.
Buttigieg and Minnesota Governor Tim Walz of Minnesota, both potential vice presidential picks for Harris, also piped up about the “cat ladies” comment on Wednesday.
“Go ahead and continue to denigrate people. My God, they went after cat people. Good luck with that,” Walz said on MSNBC. “Turn on the internet and see what cat people do when you go after them.”
Buttigieg, for his part, told CNN that Vance listed him as a “childless cat lady” at a time when he and his husband had had a “heartbreaking setback” in their efforts to adopt children. (They now have twins.)
“He couldn’t have known that,” Buttigieg said of Vance, “but maybe that’s why you shouldn’t be talking about other people’s children.”