JD Vance has his ‘basket of deplorables’ moment

Doanld Trump’s running mate is on the defensive over his views about the childless.

JD Vance arrives with wife Usha for a campaign rally at Herb Brooks National Hockey Centre in Saint Cloud, Minnesota, on Saturday. Picture: AFP

Donald Trump’s choice of 39-year-old JD Vance as his running mate was supposed to present the GOP ticket as modern and looking to the future. Instead the campaign has found itself playing defence against Vance’s censorious views about women who don’t have children.

As it always does, the press has been digging up the VP choice’s comments over the years for political scrutiny, and the Ohio senator turns out to be a target-rich environment.

As a Senate candidate in 2021 he told Tucker Carlson, then a Fox News host, that the US is being run 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”.

That sounds like he was referring to Vice-President Kamala Harris, who has two stepchildren but none of her own. The comment is the sort of smart-aleck crack that gets laughs in certain right-wing male precincts. But it doesn’t play well with the millions of female voters, many of them Republican, who will decide the presidential race.

The remark has gone viral on social media and is being portrayed as an example of chauvinist views. They’re mocking it on TMZ, a sure sign this is Vance’s first big cultural impression, and not a good one. Vance went on The Megyn Kelly Show on Friday to repair the damage, calling the cat-lady line a “sarcastic comment” that didn’t mean to denigrate single or childless women. But he wasn’t at all apologetic.

“I know the media wants to attack me and wants me to back down on this, Megyn, but the simple point that I made is that having children, becoming a father, becoming a mother, I really do think it changes your perspective in a pretty profound way,” he said.

He’s right about that, but then why didn’t he say it in 2021? One possibility is that at some level Vance really doesn’t respect people who make different life choices. Politicians often reveal their true beliefs when talking to supporters, as Hillary Clinton did when she sneered at the “basket of deplorables” who supported Trump in 2016.

Vance has also put some policy substance behind his cultural views by saying in the past that the childless should pay higher taxes than other Americans. “If you are making $100,000, $400,000 a year and you’ve got three kids, you should pay a different, lower tax rate than if you are making the same amount of money and you don’t have any kids. It’s that simple,” he told the Charlie Kirk Show podcast in 2021. The podcast with Vance has vanished from the show’s website but has been quoted widely in the press.

It’s bad policy to use the tax code for social policy because it creates complications that add distortions. Pro-natalist tax policies haven’t worked where they’ve been tried.

It’s also bad politics. Conservatives used to believe in a neutral tax code that didn’t play favourites, but Vance is suggesting the code should be used as a political and cultural weapon against people who don’t share his values. “Raise taxes on the childless” isn’t a winning campaign slogan.

An old political saw is that the best VP choice is one who gets applause upon announcement and then is never heard from again. You can tell that doesn’t apply to Vance since Trump is being asked if he still believes he made the right choice. He says he does, but the Trump campaign can’t be happy about having to defend Vance instead of focusing on Harris’s many extreme views.

If Vance doesn’t want to apologise, perhaps he could start showing up on stage with his wife, Usha. Her speech at the GOP convention was understated and warm, and she is clearly accomplished professionally.

She might help persuade swing voters that Vance respects women more than his comments have made it seem.