Usha Vance Defends JD Vance’s ‘Childless Cat Ladies’ Claim as a ‘Quip’

Usha Vance, the wife of Senator JD Vance of Ohio, defended a 2021 claim by her husband that the United States was led by unhappy “childless cat ladies,” saying that his statement was a “quip.”

In a Fox News interview published Monday, Ms. Vance said her husband, who is Donald J. Trump’s running mate on the Republican presidential ticket, had been trying to make a “substantive” point through jest.

In July 2021, Mr. Vance told Tucker Carlson on Fox News that it was “just a basic fact” that the country was led 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 county miserable, too.” Mr. Vance’s comments were met with bipartisan backlash last month when he began campaigning as Mr. Trump’s running mate.

Ms. Vance, in her interview, asserted that his “actual meaning” related to a defense of Americans who are struggling to have children.

“What he was really saying is that it can be hard to be a parent in this country,” she said, an explanation that seemed to depart in focus from what Mr. Vance had said.

She urged people to carefully examine the context around her husband’s comments.

Mr. Vance, then a Senate candidate, did not explicitly refer to challenges facing parents struggling to have children during the 2021 interview, which lasted five minutes. He said the people he was referring to were “obsessed with their jobs” and controlled by “D.C. and New York status games.”