Usha Vance tries to defend her husband's 'childless cat ladies' comment

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Usha Vance, the wife of Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance, mischaracterized her husband's past comment deriding women without children as "childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives," as she defended him in a Fox News interview that aired Monday.

"I took a moment to look and actually see what he had said and try to understand what the context was," Usha Vance said about her husband's remarks, which he made in a 2021 interview with then-Fox News host Tucker Carlson. "Because what he was really saying is that it can be really hard to be a parent in this country. And sometimes our policies are designed in a way that makes it even harder."

But that’s not what Vance was claiming. Here is what he told Carlson at the time:

While Vance did call for more support for people with children, it was in service of the larger argument that childless Americans aren’t as invested in the country’s success — a claim that was an early centerpiece of Vance’s 2022 U.S. Senate campaign in Ohio.

Recently he called the "cat ladies" remark a "sarcastic comment."

In Monday’s interview — her first solo one of the campaign — Usha Vance said her husband would never say something to hurt someone trying to have a family, and that she understands that “there are a lot of other reasons why people may choose not to have families, and many of those reasons are very good.”

“I think what I would say is, let's try to look at the real conversation that he's trying to have,” she continued. “For the many of us who want to have families, and for whom it's really hard, what can we do to make it better? What can we do to make it easier to live in 2024?”

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