JD Vance is once again under fire for his views and comments on women, including his mother-in-law and Democrat presidential nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris.
Vance is running as Republican nominee Donald Trump’s potential vice president in the upcoming US Presidential Election and is known for having conservative views on gender roles, reproductive rights and women’s issues.
Over the weekend, an interview from 2020 resurfaced, where he seems to agree with the role of “the postmenopausal female” being to care for grandchildren.
Vance was a guest on Eric Weinstein’s podcast, The Portal, in April 2020. The pair were discussing how Vance’s mother-in-law moved into the family home when his wife, Usha, gave birth to one of their sons.
Vance told Weinstein his mother-in-law moving in made his son “a much better human being”, noting the “evidence” of having a grandparent around improving the upbringing of a child is “super clear”.
Here, Weinstein, who is the host of the podcast and the managing director of the venture capital firm Thiel Capital, cut in and said to Vance: “That’s the whole purpose of the postmenopausal female in theory.” Vance replied: “Yes.”
A spokesperson for JD Vance told People magazine that the media’s resurfacing of these comments is “dishonestly putting words in JD’s mouth”.
“Of course, he does not agree with what the host said,” Taylor Van Kirk, Vance’s spokesperson said to People.
“JD reacted to the first part of the host’s sentence, assuming he was going to say: ‘That’s the whole purpose of spending time with grandparents.’”
JD Vance is married to Usha Vance, the daughter of Indian immigrants. Later, in Vance’s interview on The Portal, Weinstein remarked with seemingly racial connotations that Vance’s mother-in-law moving in was a “weird, unadvertised feature of marrying an Indian woman”. Vance did not respond to his comment.
In 2021, during an interview with Tucker Carlson, Vance implied that being childless makes you less prepared to run the country.
After Carlson’s misogynistic comment that the US is governed by “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices they’ve made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too”, JD Vance further criticised key Democrats, including Harris.
“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,” Vance told Carlson. “How does it make any sense that we’ve turned our country over to people who don’t really have a direct stake in it?”
Kamala Harris/Jeffrey Epstein?
On Sunday, Vance appeared on Fox News Sunday heavily criticising Vice President Kamala Harris and her policies as the Democrat nominee for the US Presidential Election.
During the interview with host Shannon Bream, he bizarrely compared Harris to disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein, who was convicted of several sex offences, including sex trafficking of minors.
“Giving Kamala Harris control over inflation policy, Shannon, it’s like giving Jeffrey Epstein control over human trafficking policy,” JD Vance said in the interview.
JD Vance comparing Kamala Harris to Jeffrey Epstein is a great time to remind you that the Trump campaign is literally flying Epstein’s plane around. pic.twitter.com/WfZ0PjWRZR
— Dan 🇺🇸 (@hstarshot) August 18, 2024
Donald Trump was known to have close ties with Epstein, a convicted sex offender who Trump once called “a terrific guy”. There are several photographs of the pair together.
‘I’m a better looking person than Kamala.’
JD Vance wasn’t alone in his odd approach to criticising Harris. At a Trump rally in Wilkes-Barre in Pennsylvania on Saturday, Donald Trump brought up a recent Time magazine cover that featured a drawing of Kamala Harris.
Just last week, in an interview with X owner and billionaire Elon Musk, Trump said that Harris looked “beautiful” and looked “very much like our great first lady, Melania”.
“She didn’t look like Kamala, that’s right,” Trump said to Musk. “But of course, she’s a beautiful woman, so we’ll leave it at that.”
But at the rally in Pennsylvania, Trump wanted to clarify that while she is “beautiful” he believes he is “better looking”.
“Don’t ever call a woman beautiful, because that’ll be the end of your political career, please,” Trump said at the rally.
“But I say that I am much better looking. I’m a better-looking person than Kamala.
“They said, ‘No, her biggest advantage is that she’s a beautiful woman.’ I’m going, ‘Huh?’ I never thought of that. I’m better looking than she is.”