A sitting Vice President is taking aim at his own words.
JD Vance, in a memoir hitting shelves Tuesday, publicly labels his “childless cat ladies” broadside one of the most foolish statements of his political career — a striking act of self-reckoning from a man now occupying the second-highest office in the land.
The book, titled “Communion,” chronicles Vance’s path to Roman Catholicism and includes a chapter wrestling with the tensions between Christian conviction and political life, specifically the challenge of publicly opposing abortion legalization.
It was 2021 when Vance first unleashed the comment, sitting across from Tucker Carlson on Fox News Channel’s “Tucker Carlson Tonight.” His target was Kamala Harris and the broader Democratic leadership.
“We are effectively run in this country — via the Democrat [Party], 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 told Carlson.
He pressed further: “If you look at Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, AOC, the entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children.”
For three years, those words sat largely undisturbed.
Then came 2024, and everything changed. Harris stepped into the presidential race after Joe Biden’s exit, and Vance landed on the Republican ticket alongside Donald Trump.
The old footage resurfaced with a vengeance, detonating a second political firestorm far larger than the first.
Inside “Communion,” first reported by NBC News, Vance does not sidestep the wreckage. He faces it squarely.
“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,” he writes.
Vance maps out exactly how the fallout unfolded.
“The comment caused two firestorms: the first when I made it, the second years later during a political campaign,” he writes. “It was a boneheaded comment, intentionally (and successfully) provocative rather than illuminating.”
The Vice President does not stop at self-criticism. He acknowledges the people his words failed to consider.
“I could have made that point much more effectively, and with the benefit of showing a little charity to the many Americans who — for some reasons beyond their control — don’t have children,” he writes.
His Catholic faith shapes the sharpest part of his reflection. “When I consider the Church’s admonition to respect the dignity of every life, this was a clear moment where I failed,” Vance states plainly.
That reckoning stands in contrast to how he addressed the controversy while votes were still being counted. In August 2024, appearing on NBC News’ “Meet the Press,” Vance put distance between himself and any serious regret.
“I have a lot of regrets … but making a joke three years ago is not at the top 10 of the list,” he said at the time.
Usha Vance stepped in to contextualize her husband’s remarks that same month.
“The reality is, he made a quip in service of making a point that he wanted to make that was substantive,” she told Fox News.
The future Second Lady framed the underlying message as one about the burdens of parenthood in America and policies that compound rather than ease those burdens.
September 2024 added another dramatic twist.
Taylor Swift, one of the most recognizable entertainers on the planet, planted her flag squarely in the controversy — adopting the phrase “Childless Cat Lady” as a personal emblem when she announced her endorsement of Harris and Minnesota Governor Tim Walz.
Beyond the political turbulence, “Communion” carries a deeply personal thread. Vance credits Usha — who does not share his Christian faith — as one of the book’s most rigorous editors.
“There is at least a little irony in the fact that my non-Christian wife helped lead me back to my own Christian faith, and then made it possible for me to discuss the journey on paper,” he writes. “The Lord works in mysterious ways, indeed.”
Vance won his Ohio Senate seat in 2022 before ascending to the vice presidency.
He is no stranger to memoir writing — his 2016 bestseller “Hillbilly Elegy” traced a deeply personal journey from a deteriorating steel town in southeastern Ohio through military service and Yale Law School, and introduced him to a national readership.
