Photo: Rebecca Droke/AFP/Getty Images
It’s been just over a month since Donald Trump announced J.D. Vance as his vice-presidential pick. In that time, a reliable dynamic has developed. The Ohio senator will say something about the conservative project that sounds weird — or an old comment will be revisited that sounds really weird — and he will spend the next few days addressing his quotes without actually walking them back. What was it this week?
The focus has mostly been on Vance’s obsession with pro-natalism — a philosophy that wants to push American women into having children at the right age without falling into a childless adulthood where women are forced to fill the emotional void with cats, as he famously put it. The latest problem for Vance on this topic comes from a 2020 podcast appearance with Eric Weinstein, the managing director at the venture-capital firm of Peter Thiel, the strange billionaire who bankrolled Vance’s run for Senate in 2022. In the episode, Vance and Weinstein are talking about the importance of grandparents spending time with grandchildren. Weinstein puts this in an extremely weird way, saying that “the whole purpose of the postmenopausal female” is to help raise their grandkids. Instead of pushing back or saying something normal — or mentioning that he wrote a whole book about being raised by his grandmother — Vance just said, “Yes.”
Vance agreed with Weinstein when he said that there is a “weird, unadvertised feature of marrying an Indian woman.” Vance then described how his wife’s mother took a sabbatical from her position as a biology professor to help take care of their newborn child. A spokesperson for Vance told NBC News that “the media” is “dishonestly putting words in J.D.’s mouth.” By then, the damage by proxy was done.
More old Vance quotes are weighing down the Trump ticket this week, like his 2021 speech at a Claremont Institute conference in which he blamed Amazon for property damage following the murder of George Floyd. “Who benefits most when small businesses on Main Street are destroyed?” Vance asked. “Who wants to see their competitors unable to deliver goods and services to people, so that you get it delivered in your brown Amazon box? Jeff Bezos.” He added that “the people who are invested in destroying America via our corporate class are also getting rich from it. This is an important piece of the puzzle to understand.”
Up next were more Vance quotes about abortion access, including a comment from the same speech in which he said that companies that support abortion access are looking for “cheap labor” and that they “don’t want people to parent children.”
Also unearthed this week was Vance’s appearance on a podcast in 2022 called Very Fine People. There, he said he “would like abortion to be illegal nationally.” To respond to this issue that Republicans have gotten hammered on in special elections since the Dobbs decision, Vance was given a softball question by Laura Ingraham on Fox News on Wednesday.
“One of my dear friends tonight said to me, ‘Well, all these suburban women, all they care about is abortion and they don’t understand that decision is with the states now,’” Ingraham said. “What do you say to suburban women out there who are marinating in this propaganda?” Vance wasn’t sold.
“I don’t buy that,” he said. “I think most suburban women care about the normal things that most Americans care about.” Meanwhile, most Americans aren’t sold on Vance. A new poll analysis from FiveThirtyEight shows that Vance is a less popular vice-presidential choice than Sarah Palin in 2008.
In a speech before the Milwaukee Police Association on Friday, Vance tried a joke with the crowd that didn’t stick:
In another podcast appearance from 2021, Vance gave the audience a history lesson on immigration:
Taking a question from the New York Times at the Milwaukee Police Association speech on Friday, Vance didn’t exactly clear things up:
And there was a tense moment surrounding Vance’s soda habit:
