Vice President JD Vance has finally come clean on his controversial “childless cat ladies” comment — as he prepares for a potential White House run in 2028.
In his new memoir, Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith, Vance admits that the insult he lobbed on Tucker Carlson’s since-canceled Fox News show was an “error,” NBC News reported Monday.
“One of the dumbest things I ever said came when I argued that ‘childless cat ladies’ across the Democrat Party were running our country into the ground,” Vance writes in the book, due out Tuesday. “It was a boneheaded comment, intentionally (and successfully) provocative rather than illuminating.”
Vance was riding high on the success of his bestselling memoir Hillbilly Elegy and running to represent Ohio in the U.S. Senate when he made the rude remark in 2021.
Vance disparaged Democrats as “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.”
“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,” he said. “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?”
At the time, Harris, then vice president, had two stepdaughters; Buttigieg, then transportation secretary, was days away from adopting two sons; and U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-New York, was single and not yet engaged to longtime boyfriend Riley Roberts.
Vance’s smear didn’t initially resonate widely but it resurfaced and went viral in 2024 after he became Donald Trump’s running mate, with the New York Times calling the criticism an “age-old trope” that harkened “back to the Salem Witch Trials.”
The backlash included outrage from actor Jennifer Aniston — who in 2022 revealed that she struggled for years to get pregnant, including through in vitro fertilization — saying, “I truly cannot believe this is coming from a potential VP.”
Oprah Winfrey also invoked it during her surprise appearance at the 2024 Democratic National Convention, telling the crowd that if a house is burning and it “happens to belong to a childless cat lady — well, we try to get that cat out, too.”
And actors Selena Gomez and Candice Bergen referenced it during remarks at the 2024 Emmy awards ceremony, with Gomez joking that her Only Murders in the Building costars Steve Martin and Martin Short were “this far away from being childless cat ladies.”
But rather than try to walk back the put-down, Vance doubled down, telling former Fox News host Megyn Kelly it was a “sarcastic comment” and saying, “People are focusing so much on the sarcasm and not the substance of what I actually said.”
“The substance of what I said, Megyn — I’m sorry, it’s true,” he added.
Vance also told NBC’s Meet the Press that his words were being “willfully misinterpreted” by Democrats and that he didn’t have any regrets about “making a joke three years ago.”
“I regret, certainly, that a lot of people took it the wrong way. And I certainly regret that the DNC and Kamala Harris lied about it,” he said.
Carlson even tried to take the blame, telling Kelly, “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,” he said, according to The Wrap. “It’s very ugly, and I’m ashamed of the many, many times when I’ve said nasty things like that.”
Vance’s Communion is being published amid widespread expectations that he’ll seek to succeed Trump.
In an interview excerpt released Monday, Vance said he and wife Usha “will absolutely sit down and talk about what comes next for our family” after November’s midterm elections.
“The way I make decisions is, I try not to make them until I absolutely must,” he told CBS Sunday Morning, adding that he expected Trump will “be very supportive of anything that I ultimately decide to do.”
Vance’s new book details his conversion from Protestant to atheist to Catholic and he addresses his “cat ladies” comment in a chapter that also recounts how he met Pope Francis before the pontiff’s death last year, according to NBC News.
