JD Vance Makes Confession About ‘Childless Cat Ladies’

Vice President J.D. Vance says he now regrets a 2021 comment that resurfaced during the 2024 election cycle, netting him media scrutiny as well as prompt backlash from pop artist Taylor Swift.

The vice president is reflecting on past controversies ahead of the Tuesday release of his forthcoming memoir, Communion, which details his conversion to Catholicism — and he took a moment to pan his own reference to the “childless cat ladies” who were running the country, calling it “one of the dumbest things I’ve ever said.” 

“One of the dumbest things I ever said came when I argued that ‘childless cat ladies’ across the Democrat Party were running our country into the ground,” Vance writes in the book, according to a copy obtained by NBC News.

“The comment caused two firestorms: the first when I made it, the second years later during a political campaign,” Vance adds. “It was a boneheaded comment, intentionally (and successfully) provocative rather than illuminating.”

Vance, who was running for the U.S. Senate in Ohio at the time, made the comments on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show. 

“We’re effectively run in this country via the Democrats, via our corporate oligarchs, 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 country miserable too,” Vance said at the time, arguing that childless people have less of a stake in the future of the nation. 

“You look at Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, AOC. The entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children. 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?” he asked. “We should support more people who actually have kids, because those are the people who ultimately have a more direct stake in the future of this country.” 

The comments resurfaced during the 2024 presidential election after Trump selected Vance as his running mate, creating a political headache — albeit a mild one — for the Republican ticket. Swift took to her Instagram to publicly endorse Harris — and she signed the post, in a jab at Vance, as “Taylor Swift, Childless Cat Lady.”

At the time, Vance doubled down and refused to apologize. 

“I have a lot of regrets,” Vance said in an August 2024 interview with NBC News’ “Meet the Press,” “but making a joke three years ago is not at the top 10 of the list.”

His new book, Communion, chronicles the Ohio-born politician’s faith journey from Protestantism to atheism to Catholicism and comes ten years after his memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, launched him from author to MAGA whisperer. Vance’s reflection on the “cat ladies” comment appears in a chapter in which he wrestles with the Catholic Church’s views on immigration and abortion, according to NBC.

“And that brings me to another lesson of the faith for Christian statesmen,” Vance writes. “It’s okay to admit error.”

Vance calls his 2021 remarks “enraging,” adding that it “had the added benefit of distracting from the actual point I wanted to make, which was that our society is becoming pathologically hostile to having kids.” 

He concludes: “When I consider the Church’s admonition to respect the dignity of every life, this was a clear moment where I failed.”