By picking the banal natalist Senator J.D. Vance as his running mate, Donald Trump seems to be aiming for an even smaller share of the women’s vote than he earns on his own.
Former president Donald Trump shakes hands with his choice for vice-presidential candidate, Senator J.D. Vance, at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee.(Joe Raedle / Getty Images)
Ohio Senator J.D. Vance, the newly minted GOP vice presidential nominee, has lately been scrubbing his Web presence of the anti-abortion extremism he once espoused.
A banner on top of his Web site once read: “End Abortion,” and continued: “I am 100 percent pro-life and believe that abortion has turned our society into a place where we see children as an inconvenience to be thrown away rather than a blessing to be nurtured. Eliminating abortion is first and foremost about protecting the unborn, but it’s also about making our society more pro-child and pro-family. The historic Dobbs decision puts this new era of society into motion, one that prioritizes family and the sanctity of all life.”
Oh well, that’s gone now.
Vance once favored a national abortion ban; now, he’s deferring to his maybe-boss and saying it’s OK to leave it up to states. (He’s also lying about Joe Biden wanting “taxpayer-funded abortions up until the moment of birth.”)
Although he seems to vacillate on whether he supports exceptions for rape and incest, in 2021 Vance was clear: “My view on this has been very clear and I think the question betrays a certain presumption that is wrong,” Vance said in 2021. “It’s not whether a woman should be forced to bring a child to term, it’s whether a child should be allowed to live, even though the circumstances of that child’s birth are somehow inconvenient or a problem to the society. The question really, to me, is about the baby.”
Once the question is “about the baby,” the mother’s life means less than the “baby,” which, to be clear, is an embryo or fetus at the point most such procedures take place.
We know Vance has scrubbed his social media presence, to the best of his ability, of his hostility to Trump personally. He erased old Twitter likes, including his boosting of a tweet featuring a photo of Trump and the late O.J. Simpson. “Here is an old picture of one of USA’s most hated, villainous, douchey celebs. Also in picture: OJ Simpson.” (My fave.) Unfortunately for him, he can’t pull down magazine writings in which he compared Trump to Hitler or denounced him as “heroin” for the white working class, unfortunately for him.
Remarkably, what he hasn’t tried to scrub is his vicious hostility to women who either choose to remain single, or who divorce, even if they’re fleeing “maybe even violent” marriages.
“This is one of the great tricks that I think the sexual revolution pulled on the American populace, which is the idea that like, ‘Well, OK, these marriages were fundamentally, you know, they were maybe even violent, but certainly they were unhappy,” Vance told an audience at Southern California’s Pacifica Christian High School in 2021. “And so getting rid of them and making it easier for people to shift spouses like they change their underwear, that’s going to make people happier in the long term.” He praised his grandparents, who mostly raised him due to his mother’s drug addiction, because they kept their “incredibly chaotic marriage…together to the end.”
But that might not be the worst thing he’s said about single or divorced people, mostly but not exclusively women. As he told former Fox host, the now unwatchable Tucker Carlson, in 2021: “We are effectively run in this country…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.” He then singled out Representative Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, an apparently happy, accomplished, and childless woman, as well as Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, who actually adopted twins with his husband, Chasten, and Vice President Kamala Harris, who is extremely close to her two stepchildren, the adult son and daughter of her husband, Doug Emhoff.
Also: “cat ladies?” Please. One thing that’s obvious from Trump’s choice of VP: He’s doubling down on the machismo and not trying to eat into Biden’s advantage with women voters at all.
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My former Salon colleague Amanda Marcotte heard in Vance’s ccomments echoes of recent polling, cited by Daniel Cox, finding a “divorced men’s MAGA gap,” in which divorced men are a lot more likely to vote for Trump than divorced women. According to the Survey Center on American Life, 56 percent of men who are divorced said they are voting for Trump, compared to 42 percent of divorced women.
Perhaps kindly, Cox suggests divorced people of both genders are feeling pinched, “and their personal grievances become politicized.” Of course, that’s easily refuted, since divorced women aren’t lining up “behind a violent fascist who brags about sexual assault,” as Marcotte argues. “Divorced women aren’t voting to take away men’s rights.”
Other folks have said this first, but Vance is the perfect Project 2025 running mate. Trump hates policy; Vance will get up to his jowls in it. In the chapter on Housing and Human Services I wrote about for our special issue on Project 2025, I described the plan to commit the next administration to making it “The Department of Life.” Author of the HHS chapter Roger Severino, Trump’s former HHS general counsel, explains how the next president should use his powers to “maintain a biblically based, social science–reinforced definition of marriage and family.” He asserts that “families comprised of a married mother, father, and their children are the foundation of a well-ordered nation and healthy society.” He claims that “all other family forms” apart from “heterosexual, intact marriage…involve higher levels of instability.”
And there’s so much more. As I wrote:
The plan outlines how HHS would use its power as a federal agency to dramatically curtail access to reproductive health services. Severino pledges that HHS will restrict access to birth control, rescind the FDA’s approval of medication abortion, and abolish what he calls “mail-order abortion”—the latter by using the long-dormant Comstock Act to prosecute anyone who provides such medication by mail. HHS will also focus on weeding out programs geared to the rights of LGBT people, especially anyone who is transgender. It would direct subsidies for childcare facilities to parents themselves—all in a punitive, misguided effort to shore up the nuclear family. This isn’t a public health document; it’s a theocratic manifesto, an attempt at ensuring public health through ultra-orthodox Christianity.
J.D. Vance is Severino’s natural partner. I can see Severino as HHS secretary now.
Do you know what might be the saddest thing about J.D. Vance and his views about marriage and family, though?
Despite his going all in on most MAGA insanity, the most insane MAGAs aren’t all in for him. And one reason is his lovely family. Unlike Trump, he’s had only one wife, the accomplished Usha Chilakuri Vance, a lawyer who is the child of Indian immigrants. They met at Yale; she clerked for Brett Kavanaugh before he was a justice. At 39, Vance already has three children and could have more. But the white nationalists in Trump’s base don’t trust him.
“Do we really expect that the guy who has an Indian wife and named their kid Vivek is going to support white identity?” the odious white supremacist and January 6 instigator Nick Fuentes asked.
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Other comments were uglier.
That’s the thing, dude: With this crowd, you could be cheating on your wife, or wives, like Trump did, even when they’d just given birth to your son. You’d be golden. But marry the child of an Indian immigrant and honor her culture by naming your adorable son “Vivek,” and you’ll always be an outsider.
Vance started life as an outsider, the child of poverty, addiction, divorce and violence, who made it to Yale. He’s friends with (completely asocial) billionaires like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk. He thinks he’s made it. He can call us cat ladies.
We can call him very sad, for bringing his family inside the GOP toxic little tent where it will never belong. Can’t wait for tonight’s speech!
Joan WalshTwitterJoan Walsh, a national affairs correspondent for The Nation, is a coproducer of The Sit-In: Harry Belafonte Hosts The Tonight Show and the author of What’s the Matter With White People? Finding Our Way in the Next America. Her new book (with Nick Hanauer and Donald Cohen) is Corporate Bullsh*t: Exposing the Lies and Half-Truths That Protect Profit, Power and Wealth In America.