Vance Walks Back ‘Cat Lady’ Jibe

​WASHINGTON — Vice President JD Vance has formally apologized for his infamous “childless cat ladies” remark, labeling it “one of the dumbest things I ever said” as he positions himself for the political future ahead of a potential 2028 presidential run.

​In his newly released spiritual memoir, Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith, Vance admits that the 2021 insult—lobbed during an appearance on Tucker Carlson’s former Fox News program—was a profound mistake.

​”It was a boneheaded comment, intentionally (and successfully) provocative rather than illuminating,” Vance writes in the book, which was published by HarperCollins.

​The reversal marks a stark departure from the defiant stance Vance maintained throughout the 2024 presidential campaign, when the three-year-old footage resurfaced and went viral. At the time, Donald Trump’s running mate routinely brushed off the backlash, claiming he was merely being “sarcastic” and insisting that the joke did not rank among his top ten political regrets. Later that year, he softened slightly, telling reporters he wished he had framed the thought differently.

​Now serving as Vice President, Vance uses the pages of his faith-centric memoir—a thematic sequel to his bestselling Hillbilly Elegy that centers on his 2019 conversion to Catholicism—to fully recant. He frames the rhetorical misstep as a failure of Christian statesmanship.

​”When I consider the Church’s admonition to respect the dignity of every life, this was a clear moment where I failed,” Vance writes, concluding that “it’s ok to admit error.”

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​Vance initially made the controversial comments while campaigning for an Ohio U.S. Senate seat. In the broadcast, he disparaged the Democratic Party leadership 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.”

​He explicitly targeted figures like Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, arguing that the country had been turned over to leaders who “don’t really have a direct stake in it” due to not having biological children.

​The swipe drew heavy criticism for ignoring the realities of modern family structures. At the time of his remarks, Harris was a stepmother to two children, and Buttigieg was just days away from adopting infant twins with his husband.

​While the remarks failed to make a lasting dent during his successful Senate bid, they exploded into a cultural lightning rod in 2024, mobilizing independent and female voters against the Republican ticket. Critics condemned the language as an archaic, decades-old trope, while Democrats successfully co-opted the phrase to fuel merchandise sales and grassroots organizing.

​In Communion, Vance contends that the incendiary nature of the insult ultimately backfired by eclipsing his broader policy objective. He argues that his original intent was to draw attention to a modern American society that has grown “pathologically hostile to having kids.”

​The memoir aims to establish a more compassionate conservative roadmap for family policy, urging the Republican party to champion policies that uplift mothers and children rather than focusing strictly on economic output.

​For a closer look at how this controversy first unfolded during the campaign trail, you can view this NBC News report on the initial backlash, which details how the resurrected 2021 clip became a massive political vulnerability for the Vice President.

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