During the 2024 campaign, Vice President JD Vance vociferously defended his comments about “childless cat ladies,” but in his new memoir, he admits it was “boneheaded” and “one of the dumbest things I’ve ever said.”

The kerfuffle began with Vance’s appearance on Tucker Carlson’s former Fox News show in 2021, in which he bashed Democrats as “a bunch of childless cat ladies”:

What I was basically saying is that 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.

And 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. 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?

I just wanted to ask that question and propose that maybe if we want a healthy ruling class in this country, we should invest more. We should vote more. 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.

A video clip of the interview resurfaced after President Donald Trump picked Vance as his running mate, causing outrage for multiple reasons, including the inaccuracy of targeting then-Vice President Kamala Harris, who is a stepmother to her husband Doug Emhoff’s two children, and Pete Buttigieg, who adopted two newborn twins with his husband Chasten Buttigieg just weeks after Vance’s interview with Carlson.

Vance initially claimed his critics had “lied” about what he said and “radically taken this out of context,” but it was on video, he had made other comments attacking childless people as “psychotic” and “sociopaths,” and he doubled down on his comments in a July 2024 interview on Megyn Kelly’s podcast.

Taylor Swift cited Vance’s comments in her endorsement for Harris, posting her statement with a photo of one of her beloved cats and signing it “Taylor Swift, Childless Cat Lady.”

Fast forward to 2026. Vance has a book to sell about his conversion to Catholicism, Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith, and an eye on the 2028 GOP presidential primary, with rivals like Secretary of State Marco Rubio viewed by many as having a stronger path to Trump’s endorsement and Republican primary voters.

According to a report by NBC News’ Henry Gomez, who read Vance’s book, the vice president has had a change of heart about insulting childless cat ladies:

“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, a copy of which was obtained and read 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 acknowledges that the comment was “enraging” and writes 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 adds that he “could have made that point much more effectively, and with the benefit of showing a little charity to the many Americans who — some for reasons beyond their control — don’t have children.”

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

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