When former President Donald Trump announced that Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) would be his running mate, few people in Republican political circles were happy about it.
Rupert Murdoch, the billionaire owner of several right-of-center news outlets, was not happy with the choice, nor were establishment Republicans such as Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC). Republican political operatives decried Vance as too extreme and an electoral liability that made the race much more competitive than it had been prior. And to this day, Republican politicians refuse to offer their support for Vance as the second name atop their party’s ticket.
As the rollout continued, politicians from the Democratic Party offered their own armchair analysis, claiming that Vance was a stupid pick and the party was benefiting from him as old quotes that the senator had made on podcasts and events were taken out of context and blasted over the airwaves. All the while, eagerly complicit media have bolstered every single attack line against the vice presidential nominee and gleefully reported on any hint of infighting within the Trump campaign.
For all the hysteria surrounding Trump’s selection of Vance as his running mate, the freshman senator from Ohio is still the right man for the job, and ejecting him from the ticket would be political suicide. To replace him at this moment would be an admission that the decisive and assertive decision-making that the people crave in their political leadership cannot be found in the Trump-led ticket.
Arguably, no Republican vice presidential nominee rollout in recent memory has gone well. Whoever happens to be the GOP candidate’s running mate is guaranteed to meet a tidal wave of negative coverage and intense scrutiny, whether it be Mike Pence in 2016, Paul Ryan in 2012, Sarah Palin in 2008, or Dick Cheney in 2000. In this respect, Vance is no different.
In the weeks since he became the Republican Party’s nominee for vice president, Vance has weathered a storm of criticism that primarily centers on a sarcastic comment he made in 2022 about “childless cat ladies” controlling the Democratic Party.
“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 said. “And it’s just a basic fact.”
The broader point that the senator was making had nothing to do with childless women who have cats but rather how government and corporations have made it more difficult to have and raise families, and people who do not want children are less likely to want to enact policies that help those who do.
If only to prove the point, Dave Portnoy, the childless founder of Barstool Sports, angrily blasted Vance on social media for suggesting that he should pay more in taxes than someone who has children and makes the same income.
Ammar Moussa, the rapid response director for Vice President Kamala Harris, said, “JD Vance’s attacks on childless Americans is even vile” because he supported lower tax rates for families, a policy that the Harris campaign has claimed to support in the form of the child tax credit.
It is true that the media firestorm over Vance’s public comments from years ago has given rise to a chorus of voices claiming he was a terrible choice for vice president. But these voices largely have one thing in common: They never wanted Vance in the first place because they oppose the policy agenda he would bring to the administration. Their opposition is primarily ideological, not political.
In an interview with Fox News that aired Monday, Usha Vance, the senator’s wife, offered a masterful response to those who are deriding her husband as some sort of misogynist.
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“The reality is he made a quip in service of making a point that he wanted to make that was substantive, and it had actual meaning,” she said. “And I just wish sometimes that people would talk about those things and that we would spend a lot less time just sort of going through this three-word phrase or that three-word phrase because what he was really saying is that it can be really hard to be a parent in this country. And sometimes, our policies are designed in a way that make it even harder. And we should be asking ourselves, ‘Why is that true?’ What is it about our leadership and the way that they think about the world that makes it so hard sometimes for parents, and that’s the conversation that I really think that we should have.”
Since he arrived on the political scene with his bestselling memoir Hillbilly Elegy, Vance has shown that the well-being of the people of this country, now and for posterity, is his foremost concern. And while that has taken different forms over time, whatever attacks the media, the Democrats, and the Republican establishment levy against him, Trump made the right choice in selecting his running mate. The nation would be lucky to have Vice President J.D. Vance.