J.D. Vance wouldn’t change a thing about his now infamous “childless cat ladies” comment from three years ago, he told Kristen Welker on “Meet the Press” Sunday morning. “Look, I regret certainly that a lot of people took it the wrong way, and I certainly regret the DNC and Kamala Harris lied about it,” Vance snidely explained.
When pushed, the Republican vice presidential candidate added, “Look, Kristen, I’m going to say things from time to time that people disagree with. I’m a real person. I’m going to make jokes, I’m going to say things sarcastically.”
“And I think that what’s important is that we focus on the policy,” he continued. “There are certainly going to be things that I say if I’m elected vice president that people are going to say, ‘Well, I wish he had said that differently.’ I think it’s most important to actually be the person I actually am, and to say those sarcastic comments were made in the service of a real substantive point.”
The original comments from Vance that have received widespread condemnation (even from sources such as actress Jennifer Aniston) were, “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 they’ve made, and they want to make the rest of the country miserable too.” In the original segment, they appeared to be said with a tinge of humor, but also in a personal attack against members of the Biden administration.
The point Vance went on Sunday to say he was trying to make: “This country has become too anti-family. It’s too expensive to afford a house. It’s too expensive to afford groceries. Donald Trump and I want to change that. And unless we get better leadership, we’re not going to.”
Welker pushed back and specifically asked Vance about people who might have been hurt by the comment, after earlier describing it as a “gut punch” to many women. “I think that it’s much more important for me to just be a normal human being who sometimes says things —” he began before Welker interjected, “So no regrets?”
” — people disagree with. I have a lot of regrets, Kristen, but making a joke three years ago is not at the top 10 of the list,” Vance continued.
Tucker Carlson admitted to Megyn Kelly that he takes responsibility for pushing Vance into making his original comments. “The childless cat lady thing I felt bad about,” he explained. “I haven’t looked at the tape again, but I’m pretty sure I egged him on to say something like that, and I think it’s a mean thing. I think I’m responsible for that, and I have a tendency to get way over my skis and get mean, and I regret that. It’s very ugly, and I’m ashamed of the many, many times when I’ve said nasty things like that.”
“I feel sorry for childless people, whether they have cats or not, and I mean it as someone who has four children who are the root of my happiness,” Carlson added. However, looking back at the original interview, it doesn’t appear that Carlson did much to goad Vance into making the remarks.
Vance and Welker also discussed Trump’s potential to impose more tariffs that could impact the American public financially. In 2018 and 2019, the Trump administration applied thousands of new tariffs to products, which resulted in one of the largest effective tax increases in decades and cost the public almost $80 million.
Such tariffs, Vance said, are “a necessary thing.” He continued, “We know that China and a number of other countries are using, effectively, slave labor to undercut the wages of American workers. Donald Trump thinks that has to stop. And again, what Kamala Harris is saying, Kristen, is that if you do this, you’re somehow going to cause skyrocketing inflation. In reality, Donald Trump already did it. He brought a lot of jobs back, and it didn’t cause inflation.”
Welker asked if Vance can acknowledge that “consumers ultimately will pay more if there are more tariffs imposed,” but he refused, “Because I think economists really disagree about the effects of tariffs.”
“Because there can be a dynamic effect, right? So what some economists will say is what you just said, that it will actually raise costs for consumers,” Vance continued. “But what other people say, and I think the record supports this other view, is that it causes this dynamic effect where more jobs come into the country.”
“Anything that you lose on the tariff from the perspective of the consumer, you gain in higher wages, so you’re ultimately much better off. You have more take-home pay, you have better jobs. And also we have more reliance.”
“Because one of the things we learned during Covid — and I don’t, by the way, blame Democrats for this. But one of the things we learned during Covid, Kristen, is that if our supply chains are really brittle, if we depend on the Chinese to make too much of our stuff, then prices can skyrocket at a time of crisis. The economists just say that tariffs are bad. They don’t take that into account. And we’ve all learned it the hard way,” Vance concluded.
Trump’s proposed tariffs would likely “hike taxes by another $524 billion annually and shrink GDP by at least 0.8 percent, the capital stock by 0.7 percent, and employment by 684,000 full-time equivalent jobs,” according to the nonpartisan Tax Foundation.
It’s worth noting that the Biden administration has upheld most of Trump’s tariffs. In another “Meet the Press” interview Sunday, Sen. Elizabeth Warren noted that while she disagreed with Trump’s tariffs, tariffs themselves are an important tool for the U.S. to have available.
You can watch the full interview with J.D. Vance and Kristen Welker on “Meet the Press” in the video above.
