OPINION
MAUREEN DOWD
JD Vance,
Purr-fectly Dreadful
July 27,
2024, 7:00 a.m. ET
Maureen Dowd
By Maureen
Dowd
Opinion
Columnist, reporting from Washington
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/27/opinion/jd-vance-cat-ladies.html
Suddenly,
Donald Trump looks enlightened about women.
Sure, he’s
in a 1959 time warp, like some spray-tanned, comb-over swinger in a Vegas
lounge, talking about skirts and broads.
Sure, he
filled the Supreme Court with religious zealots ending women’s rights.
Sure, he has
been held liable for sexual abuse, accused of groping and caught talking about
his right to grab women by their lady parts. He cheated on his first wife with
the woman who became his second wife and then had flings when he was married to
his third wife. He betrayed Melania with a porn star while she was home nursing
their son and humiliated her again when the Stormy Daniels case went to trial.
(See: Why Melania did not give a convention speech.)
Sure, his
convention beatification was a dated homage to machismo, with Hulk Hogan
tearing his shirt off and the U.F.C.’s Dana White introducing Trump as a
fighter.
And yet,
somehow, Trump managed to choose a vice-presidential pick whose views on women
are even more draconian and meanspirited than his own.
JD Vance, he
of many names, is off to a thudding start. He went on Megyn Kelly’s podcast
Friday for cleanup on Aisle Feline. She sympathetically asked him about his
2021 rant to Tucker Carlson that top Democrats — Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg
and A.O.C. — were “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.”
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Vance
explained to Kelly: “Obviously, it was a sarcastic comment. I’ve got nothing
against cats.”
Ha. Ha. Ha.
He’s the Republican Party’s biggest wit since that laugh riot Sarah Palin.
He doubled
down on the substance of his earlier argument, that only women who are in a
traditional marriage, using their uteruses in a way JD Vance deems proper, can
have “a direct stake” in America.
I grew up in
a family brimming with military uniforms, police uniforms, altar boy outfits,
Girl Scout uniforms, Catholic school uniforms and presidential medals for
bravery. We were religious and patriotic and unbelievably proud to be
Americans.
And now
comes this ridiculous faux-billy, tailoring his beliefs to match his ambition,
telling me I have no stake in America?
Unless women
are fulfilling their duties as breeders and helpmates, they’re not fully
Americans? It’s an un-American stance that’s beneath contempt.
Phony. Vance
has a lovely wife, Usha, the daughter of Indian immigrants, a star of Yale Law
School and a litigator at a top law firm. She clerked for Chief Justice John
Roberts at the Supreme Court and Brett Kavanaugh on the U.S. Court of Appeals
for the D.C. Circuit.
Their
marriage is clearly a modern one. He donned an Indian robe for one of their
wedding ceremonies, which irked white supremacists supportive of Trump.
Nick
Fuentes, a white supremacist who dined with Trump at Mar-a-Lago in 2022, said,
“Do you really expect that the guy who has an Indian wife and named their kid
Vivek is going to support white identity?”
(The Vivek
news surprised some MAGA delegates in Milwaukee.)
Vance
replied Friday simply that he loves his wife. But on the campaign trail, he
projects an archaic image nurtured by Heritage Foundation-Project 2025 fanatics
and Vance’s fellow superconservative Catholics. You get the impression that
they would love nothing more than to dispatch women back to the kitchen and
bedroom, turning them into what Hilary Mantel called “breeding stock,
collections of organs.”
Vance also
said in a speech three years ago that parents should “absolutely” get a bigger
say in how a democracy functions and more voting power; in different remarks,
he said that childless Americans should pay higher taxes. Turns out, JD is as
undemocratic as his running mate.
In 2022,
Vance said he wanted abortion to be illegal nationally, though now he has
amended his position to be more in line with Trump’s, giving states the power
to decide. (Until they’re in the Oval Office, cave to the Christian right and
get a national ban.)
Vance was so
adamant on the issue when he was running for Senate that he said there should
be a federal “response” to block women from traveling to other states to get
abortions. He was worried that George Soros would send a jumbo jet to pick up
“disproportionately Black women” and take them to California to “go have
abortions.”
Vance wrote
the foreword for the upcoming book by Kevin Roberts, the president of the
Heritage Foundation. Project 2025 wants to put on a full-court press to ban
abortion and products like mifepristone and wants to restrict access to Plan B.
This is the same wing of the party, cultural reactionaries, that targeted
I.V.F. treatments.
And last
month, Vance voted against a Democratic bill to protect I.V.F.
Trump chose
Vance to stir up cultural resentment in rural areas and small towns against
elites and cosmopolitan types. Down with Carrie Bradshaw!
As a
cat-loving, cosmopolitan type myself, I do not want Trump and Vance making
intimate decisions for American women or judging us or disparaging us for our
lives — all nine of them.
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