JD Vance once said his wife "got three kids"

JD Vance has evoked many reactions during his few years in Washington. The former author and venture capitalist entered politics in June 2021 when he announced he was running for Senate. Just shy of four years later, the father-of-three finds himself working in the White House as the Vice President of the United States.

One of the more controversial statements JD Vance made happened in 2021. In an interview with Fox host Tucker Carlson, he said Democrats were running the US and “a bunch of childless cat ladies.”

Vance’s comment about people not being focused on creating a family caused plenty of controversy. Then, last year, another of his remarks about his children made headlines—or, according to JD, his wife’s children.

Vance’s political career has been short but very successful so far, and it appears that he was destined for a life as a politician. When he returned from his deployment in Iraq with the Marines, Vance landed the “holy grail” of positions as media relations officer within the Marine Corps public affairs division in Cherry Point, North Carolina. The role was usually reserved solely for senior Marines, but with Vance they made an exemption.

“The experience taught me a valuable lesson: That I could do it. I could work 20-hour days when I had to. I could speak clearly and confidently with TV cameras shoved in my face. I could stand in a room with majors, colonels, and generals and hold my own. I could do a captain’s job even when I feared I couldn’t,” Vance wrote in his book.

He perfected his skills, and his hard work didn’t go unnoticed. Curt Keester, a Marine Corps veteran who served with Vance at Cherry Point, recalled when he and his then-colleague traveled to New York City for Fleet Week. As they waited for the wreath-laying ceremony, media outlets approached them.

“As we’re standing there waiting, a broadcaster, a radio journalist, came up and started asking us questions, asked, ‘What are your thoughts?’ I gave what I considered to be a terrible answer,” Keester recalled, speaking to CNN, reported by AOL.

“He asked JD the same question, and right off the top of his head, he gives this eloquent Winston Churchill-like quote, and at that moment it dawned on me how cut out for public affairs he was. He was a natural.”

JD Vance – road to the White House

After first graduating from Ohio State and later Yale Law School, Vance would go on to write and publish his bestselling memoir Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis, which later was adapted into a movie. It opened up a new world and ended with Vance connecting with investors, among them AOL co-founder Steve Chase.

He gave the then-praised author a job offer at his firm, Revolution, focusing on investing in Midwestern startups. JD went on to start his own venture capital company in Cincinnati. In 2018, though, things changed.

That year Vance was considered a US Senate candidate. He declined to enter the race for family reasons, but three years later things changed again. When Republican Rob Portman, the junior US Senator from Ohio, decided not to seek reelection, Vance entered the discussion.

He decided to join the race and placed first in the Republican primary in May 2022, landing just over 32 percent of the votes. Vance was caught in his first big media storm the year before that.

In 2021, JD was interviewed by Fox News host Tucker Carlson, and a clip from said interview resurfaced last year on X. In the interview, the then-Senate-candidate complained about the US being run by Democrats, corporate oligarchs as well as “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices they’ve made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.”

JD Vance’s controversial ‘cat ladies’ comment

“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 was openly criticized for his claims, which were portrayed as an attack on all women in the US. Years later, after becoming the Vice President candidate, he again opened up on the interview, stating that it was taken out of context. Moreover, in an interview with Fox News, his wife, Usha Vance, argued the same thing, saying that people should look at it with a broader scope.

“I took a moment to look and actually see what he had said and try to understand what the context was and all that, which is something that I really wish people would do a little bit more often,” the now-Second Lady said. “And the reality is he made a quip in service of making a point that he wanted to make that was substantive, and it had actual meaning.”

While Vance underperformed compared to other Republicans from Ohio in the general election, he won the Senate seat, beating Democratic candidate Tim Ryan. It may have been the endorsement from Donald Trump that paved the way. Yet espite Trump’s endorsement of Vance at the time, they haven’t always had a good relationship.

JD Vance once called Donald Trump a “fraud”

In 2017, Vance sent messages to a former friend from law school on X, formerly Twitter, which were later verified by CNN. He spoke about how he opposed the American Health Care Act—the Republican plan to replace Obamacare—and called Trump a “moral disaster.” In 2016, in a conversation with Kentucky radio host Matt Jones, Vance also criticized Trump and his politics.

“I cannot stand Trump because I think he’s a fraud. Well, I think he’s a total fraud that is exploiting these people,” Jones said to Vance, per CNN.

“I do too,” Vance replied. “I agree with you on Trump, because I don’t think that he’s the person. I don’t think he actually cares about folks. I think he just recognizes that there was a hole in the conversation and that hole is that people from these regions of the country, they feel ignored. They feel left out and they feel very frustrated. And I think of course in a lot of ways they feel that way for totally justifiable reasons. So it’s a problem that Trump has been the vessel of a lot of that frustration.”

On January 3, 2023, Vance was sworn in in Washington, D.C. He became the first Senator from Ohio without any previous political experience since famous astronaut John Glenn made the same journey in 1974. At the time, Vance said, “I hope that with this position, I can lend my voice to the millions of working—and middle-class Ohioans who have been left behind by decades of failed leadership.”

So what did Vance do in the Senate? As per NBC, he sponsored 57 bills, though none of them passed the Senate. Moreover, he was a member of the Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs: Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee and the Special Committee on Aging. But his tenure as Senator would not be a long one, as Donald Trump had other plans.

JD Vance became Trump’s pick for Vice President. In August last year, shortly after announcing Vance as his VP pick, Trump said: “My interpretation is he’s strongly family-oriented. But that doesn’t mean that if you don’t have a family, there’s something wrong with that.”

JD Vance’s comment about wife “got three kids” goes viral

Trump and Vance have been very busy at the White House in these first few months. They have taken a firm standpoint on tariffs and the war in Ukraine, but that isn’t the only thing that has become news. Vance has, just like his boss, made headlines for several comments made during press conference. A little while ago, the VP sparked rage online after his words in an interview with The New York Times last year.

In a piece published on October 12, Vance was asked whether his wife, Usha, had converted to Catholicism from her Hindu faith. Vance answered that she hadn’t but that they still attended church together as a family. That itself wasn’t something the internet took notice of, but rather the way he described his wife.

“She’s got three kids. Obviously I help with the kids, but because I’m kind of the one going to church, she feels more responsibility to keep the kids quiet in the church. And I just felt kind of bad. Like, oh, you didn’t sign up to marry a weekly churchgoer. Are you OK with this? And she was more than OK with it, and that was a big part of the confirmation that this was the right thing for me,” Vance told the New York Times.

“That’s insane”

Many voiced their opinion online after JD Vance’s comment–and it wasn’t all positive. Some even thought it was creepy.

“Throughout this campaign, JD Vance has repeatedly referred to his children as belonging to his wife and implies it’s her responsibility to care for them. This patriarchal and anachronistic parenting model is exactly what he will try to force on America if elected,” one person wrote, as per the Huffington Post.

“I’ve never heard a man refer to his kids as my wife’s children. That’s insane,” another wrote.

A third added, “*she* has three kids??? SHE has three kids? DID SHE MIRACLE THEM BY HERSELF, VANCE.”

“He’s done this repeatedly – referred to his kids as “her kids,” and it is so deeply fucking weird and such a red flag,” a fourth stated.

What do you think of JD Vance ‘s comment? Did it deserve critique, or was it simply a misunderstanding of words? Please share this article on Facebook and give us your opinion!