Now, it might have been sensible for Donald Trump’s newly named running mate to put out a statement like this: “I said something boneheaded three years ago, and I regret it.”
But rather than doing cleanup and moving on, Vance is expanding the blast zone. On Friday, he told SiriusXM talk show host Megyn Kelly: “Sometimes it’s the truest and most important points that cause them to attack you the most.”
The specific words he chose, Vance said, were meant to be “a sarcastic comment. I’ve got nothing against cats.”
Vance also indicated, implausibly, that he had been uncertain of Harris’s “family situation” when he branded her one of those bitter, childless cat fanciers.
The makeup of Harris’s family is not exactly an anomaly in modern America. When she got married a decade ago, Harris became the stepmother of two children, who call her “Momala.” And it speaks well of the dynamic in that blended family that one of the people offended by Vance’s slap at the vice president was her husband’s ex-wife. “These are baseless attacks,” Kerstin Emhoff said. “For over 10 years, since Cole and Ella were teenagers, Kamala has been a co-parent with Doug and I.”
In his interview with Kelly, Vance said: “Having kids is a profoundly life-altering thing. It’s a fundamentally good thing.” He also said that the nation’s low birth rate is a “profoundly dangerous and destabilizing thing.” (If you listen to Vance for any length of time, you notice that he really likes the word “profoundly.”)
Vance insisted that the larger point of his cat-lady crack is that Democrats are “anti-family.” This is a dubious assertion. Led by President Biden, Democrats have been fighting, against some Republican opposition in the Senate, to bring back the expanded child tax credit put in place during the covid pandemic.
Of course, Vance knows — we all know — that any backtracking would not sit well with his running mate, who says obnoxious things on practically an hourly basis and has never been known to apologize for any of them.
But what has become clear in Vance’s rocky national rollout is that this sort of thing is going to keep happening. As he opportunistically reinvented himself from NeverTrumper to ultimate MAGA warrior, Vance created a rich vein for opposition researchers to mine.
Take, for instance, his idea, advanced in a 2021 speech, that people with children should be allowed to cast additional votes on behalf of their offspring. “When you go to the polls in this country as a parent, you should have more power,” he said.
That was, he told Kelly, merely “a thought experiment.”
Uh, okay. But it was also another way of showing what little respect he has for people whose choices and circumstances are different from his own.
These stumbles by Vance are deepening the doubts that many Republicans are feeling about the wisdom of Trump’s choosing such a polarizing and untested running mate, which he did before Biden dropped out of the race. The calculation then was that Vance’s own life story, laid out movingly in his Republican National Convention acceptance speech, would resonate with the aggrieved Trump base.
But the prospect of Harris at the top of the Democratic ticket has changed the dynamic of the election. Though the vice president still has plenty of ground to make up, her party no longer appears to be on the road to a certain rout in November.
“If you had a time machine, if you go back two weeks, would [Trump] have picked JD Vance again? I doubt it,” conservative commentator Ben Shapiro speculated on his radio show. “I think he probably would have picked somebody like Glenn Youngkin from Virginia in an attempt to broaden out his base.”
Trump surely doesn’t enjoy being asked, as he has, whether he regrets his impulsive choice of a Mini-Me as a running mate. “He’s doing really well,” the former president has insisted. “He’s really caught on.” And in one sense, that is true. Vance is giving people a lot to talk about.
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