Another poorly phrased statement from JD Vance’s past is coming back to bite him. What’s new?

In a 2021 Fox News interview with Tucker Carlson, the Republican pick for vice president went off on a demographic he claimed was running America into the ground: “childless cat ladies.”

“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,” he said. 

“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 continued. “And 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?”

Vance, for his part, has three children — but even setting aside the ridiculousness of claiming you need children to have a stake in America, his callout of Harris was blatantly inaccurate.

Lest we forget that Harris, who Vance directly called childless, has two stepchildren, Cole and Ella Emhoff — or does Vance not think that blended families count? Ella Emhoff chimed in on Vance’s comments on her Instagram story: “How can you be ‘childless’ when you have cutie pie kids like Cole and I,” she wrote. “I love my three parents.”

Buttigieg now also has two kids, who he adopted in 2021, though not before Vance made his statement.

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But beyond the politicians Vance was baselessly attacking, plenty of the Americans he claims to represent fall under the category of “childless cat ladies” — including arguably the biggest celebrity in the world.

We’re speaking, of course, about Taylor Swift, who famously adores her three cats. She even brought one of them (adorably named Benjamin Button) to her photoshoot for the cover of Time, producing an image that Swifties and political junkies alike are now referencing to prove just how badly Vance messed up.  Combine Swift’s love of cats with the fact that she has no kids, and it’s a perfect recipe for her to send her massive fandom after Vance — and, in the process, the entire Trump campaign. 

Swift has yet to endorse any candidates for the 2024 election, though she did endorse Joe Biden back in 2020, rallying her fans behind him. After this discourse, she could well be on the way to doing the same for Harris.

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