In reviewing the wildest things vice-presidential nominee J.D. Vance has ever said, I think we must start with the thing he didn’t say, the elephant in the room: No, Vance has not made any public admissions about having fucked a couch. The marine and author turned senator was recently accused of having written about sexing up a sofa in his 2016 memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, allegedly burying an “inside-out latex glove” between two cushions and going to town. The rumor has demonstrated remarkable sticking power despite having been debunked, due to what some have described as its innate believability. As the Democrats will be reminding you at every possible opportunity between now and Election Day, Vance is a weird guy with a colorful history of making absolutely wild statements. A prominent player on the young new right, Vance — formerly a vocal Never Trumper — has developed a strange and paranoid worldview, and he has very few qualms about sharing it out loud.
Below, a running highlights reel. Updates will surely follow.
He’s disconcerted by the idea that this country is being run by “childless cat ladies.”
When it resurfaced in July, this item quickly became one of Vance’s most infamous quotes, gaining so much traction that he’s now beefing with Jennifer Aniston. Here it is: In 2021 (which is to say, early in Joe Biden’s presidency), Vance complained to Tucker Carlson that the U.S. was being run by “childless cat ladies who are miserable in their own lives and the choices that they’ve made,” and “want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.” As evidence, he pointed to vice-president and step-mother Kamala Harris, Transportation secretary and adoptive father Pete Buttigieg, as well as congresswoman and dog owner Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, arguing that a person without biological children can’t have a stake in the future. He’s since walked back the comment by degrees — “I’ve got nothing against cats,” he claims — but nonetheless appears obsessed with birthing, warning that the “childless left” lack a “physical commitment” to the country and blaming his bad press on the idea that most journalists are “angry,” “miserable,” and “childless adults.” He has also argued that childless members of the “leadership class” are “more sociopathic” and make the country “less mentally stable,” and he’s speculated that the “most deranged” and “most psychotic” critics on social media tended not to have kids. In a recent CNN interview, he also appeared to suggest that Harris — whose step-kids call her her “Momala” — is “anti-child” and certainly “part of a set of ideas that exist in American leadership that is anti-family.”
He’s disturbed by teachers who don’t have children.
Also in 2021, when he was evidently experiencing peak procreation obsession, Vance went after Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, because she “doesn’t have a single child.” At a forum hosted by the Center for Christian Virtue, Vance voiced his now-familiar complaint about the childless “leaders of the left” supposedly “trying to brainwash the minds of our children,” saying it “really disorients” and “disturbs” him. Noting that he “hate[s] to be so personal about this,” Vance name-checked Weingarten: “If she wants to brainwash and destroy the minds of children, she should have some of her own and leave ours the hell alone.” When the clip resurfaced in August, Vance’s spokesperson defended the remarks in a statement to NBC News, pledging that Vance “will continue to loudly call out this crap to defend our kids.” For her part, Weingarten called his comments “sad and insulting to millions of modern families, and school teachers including Catholic nuns, none of whom should be targeted for their family decisions.” Vance was a relatively fresh convert to Catholicism at the time (he officially adopted the religion in 2019, under the influence of the billionaire Peter Thiel), so maybe that explains the oversight.
He thinks people with children should be rewarded with extra votes.
As may be clear from the above, Vance has a lot of trad-ass opinions about parenting. (Despite the fact that the mother of his own children was, until very recently, a working lawyer at an elite law firm.) Though he has (for example) voted against federal protections for IVF and called universal day care “class war against normal people,” he’s also evinced support for a U.S. version of a loan-forgiveness program instituted by Hungary’s far-right nationalist prime minister, in which same-sex married couples get financial kickbacks for having more kids. On top of all that, he’s said that people who have kids deserve more votes per election. “Let’s give votes to all children in this country, but let’s give control over those votes to the parents of those children,” he said in 2021. Vance explained that people who don’t have kids — whether by choice or, I guess, because they can’t — should “face the consequences and reality” of their childless status, because “if you don’t have as much of an investment in the future of this country, maybe you shouldn’t get nearly the same voice.”
He’s also said some frightening things about reproductive health.
Vance’s views on abortion — that it isn’t acceptable, even in cases of rape and/or incest, and that law enforcement should play a role in policing patients’ medical decisions — are strong, if not out of line with his hard-right pivot. Sound bites such as “the rejection of the American family is perhaps the most pernicious and the most evil thing the left has done in this country” don’t feel especially surprising, given the context. But, consider this hypothetical scenario he spun out about the fall of Roe v. Wade, before the Supreme Court actually overturned it. If abortion became illegal in his state (Ohio), he worried, then “every day George Soros sends a 747 to Columbus to load up disproportionately Black women to get them to go have abortions in California. And of course, the left will celebrate this as a victory for diversity — uh, that’s kind of creepy.” He went on to say that, due to the situation’s supposed creepiness, he would be “pretty sympathetic” to some sort of “federal response to prevent it from happening.” Which is itself a pretty creepy prospect.
He said he felt his most “female” on the day he was too weepy to watch Garden State.
As our colleagues at Intelligencer have noted, Vance liked to indulge in a little “moody blogging” during the mid-aughts. Ahead of his deployment to Iraq, a 20-year-old Vance reflected on feelings of loneliness and intense homesickness, in distinctly 2005 terms:
Needless to say it was a crappy day, and I hate airports, and yesterday was incredibly emotional for me. I honestly can say that I felt more like a female than I think I ever have or ever will. …I couldn’t watch Garden State because New Jersey’s landscape is so much like Ohio’s, the music is so relevant to my life right now, and the story of a guy returning home, realizing that home isn’t what it used to be, etc. made me want to tear up.
Listen, I’m not in a position to judge anyone for posting a retrospectively embarrassing blog, nor for crying during Garden State in 2005. I just wonder if this wasn’t a window into the bizarre gender politics to come, particularly given that Vance would later describe his blogged “ruminations” as being “like a diary, only far more masculine.”
He’s called Trump “an idiot,” a “cynical asshole,” and “America’s Hitler.”
I’m not saying he’s wrong, but I think that — if I were running for president — I probably wouldn’t want my second-in-command to have gone on the record saying, “My God, what an idiot!” when asked about me, nor would I want them using adjectives including “noxious” and “reprehensible” to describe my character. But back in 2016, Vance was talking a lot of shit on whatever platform would have him. In fairness, I guess, Vance drew the Hitler parallel as an either/or — “I go back and forth between thinking Trump is a cynical asshole like Nixon who wouldn’t be that bad (and might even prove useful) or that he’s America’s Hitler,” he Facebook messaged a friend during Trump’s first run — so maybe his presence on the ticket settles the question. Anyway, during his Senate run, he said he “regret[s] being wrong about the guy,” and subsequently earned himself a Trump endorsement along with the title of suck-up.
He’s outlined a vision for the second Trump presidency that sounds a lot like dictatorship.
During a 2021 podcast with a prominent men’s-rights activist, Vance called for a “de-woke-ification program” in which the right would “seize the institutions of the left, and turn them against the left.” He went on to say that, should Trump win in 2024, he would encourage his boss to “fire every single mid-level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people. And when the courts stop you, stand before the country, and say — quoting Andrew Jackson — ‘the chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.’” Based on a recent ABC interview, it sounds like Vance stands by that advice.
He considers Alex Jones to be a reliable source.
Vance’s late-in-life Catholic pivot might help explain the following sentiment, expressed in remarks to a 2021 conference of young conservatives. Defending a previous assertion that Infowars host Alex Jones — who owes $1.5 billion to the families of Sandy Hook shooting victims for spreading the conspiracy theory that the massacre was a hoax — was a “better source of information than Rachel Maddow,” Vance offered the following:
It’s like, yeah, okay, this person believes crazy things. But I bet if you’re being honest with yourself, every single person in this room believes at least something that’s a little crazy, right? I believe the devil is real and that he works terrible things in our society. … We have to get away from this weird tension that we feel in our chest when somebody says, “This person believes something crazy. Therefore, you must denounce them.”
He theorized that Biden might be trying to murder Trump supporters with fentanyl.
Speaking of crazy beliefs and conspiracy theories, Vance once floated the idea that Biden had weaponized border policy against Trump’s base in an attempt at mass retribution via fatal overdose. “If you wanted to kill a bunch of MAGA voters in the middle of the heartland, how better than to target them and their kids with this deadly fentanyl?” he told the Gateway Pundit in 2022. “It does look intentional. It’s like Joe Biden wants to punish the people who didn’t vote for him and opening up the floodgates to the border is one way to do it.”
In August, he shifted his focus to Harris, telling CBS that fentanyl addiction is her fault, claiming that “if Harris was applying proper leverage to the Chinese and to the Mexican drug cartels, we would not have so many people dying of fentanyl overdoses.”
He is a certified freak for Diet Mountain Dew.
Another thing about Vance is that he freakin’ loves Diet Mountain Dew, and he is always bringing it up. “Democrats say that it is racist to believe … well, they say it’s racist to do anything,” he said at a July rally. “I had a Diet Mountain Dew yesterday and one today, and I’m sure they’re going to call that racist too. But — it’s good.” Several days later, in BTS footage from a campaign event in Radford, Virginia, Vance again bumped his beloved DMD while giving his followers a look at the Trump buffet: “They’ve got a ton of crap for you to drink and eat,” he says, plucking a chilled bottle of his favorite soda from its ice bucket. “They’ve got about a dozen Snickers, a bag of chips — if I ate even half this stuff, of course, I’d balloon up like crazy. This is the energy that powers the presidential and vice-presidential campaign.” Which, yeah, it shows.
He doesn’t know how to order a doughnut.
In an apparent effort to showcase their candidate’s irrepressible charisma, Vance’s staff staged a humanizing visit to a Georgia doughnut shop in late August. Unfortunately for them, footage of the interaction did not have the desired effect: Vance, accompanied by his security detail and a thicket of photographers, strolls in and announces that “the zoo has come to town”; in turn, the woman behind the counter informs him that she “doesn’t want to be on-camera.” When he gives his name and informs her that he’s running for vice-president, her one-word response — “Okay” — hangs in the air between him as he grasps after a normal pastry order. “We’re going to do two dozen, just a random assortment of stuff here,” he says, pausing to ask how long she’s worked at the shop. (Roughly one month, imagine!) As she guides the conversation back to doughnuts, he requests “just everything. I see a lot of the glazed here, some sprinkle stuff, some of these cinnamon rolls, whatever makes sense.” As she boxes that up, Vance plows ahead with his driest small talk, rounding off a clip that doesn’t even last two minutes but feels ten times longer. He subsequently told NBC News that he “just felt terrible” for the doughnut-shop employee, which is fair — he’s not wrong to say that it must be anxiety inducing getting ambushed by “20 Secret Service agents” and “15 cameras” — but he also blamed the whole thing on his staff and their subpar planning, rather than his own awkwardness. Whatever makes sense, I guess.
He agrees with Trump’s assessment that the vice-president doesn’t matter.
In a moment of puzzling humility, Vance recently ceded his boss’s point that people don’t really care about the VP. “They’re voting for Donald Trump or for Kamala Harris, not for J.D. or Tim Walz,” Vance told Jonathan Karl of ABC News. “I also think that he’s right that the politics of this really don’t matter that much.”
Though Vance is far from the first person to characterize the VP’s office as unimportant — the first of FDR’s seconds famously said it wasn’t “worth a pitcher of warm piss” — the context here makes the quote. Amid escalating scrutiny of Vance’s rhetorical history and flagging enthusiasm for him as a candidate, Trump — fresh off an assassination attempt — was asked if Vance would be ready to step in “on day one,” if needed. Rather than answer, he said this: “Historically, the vice-president, in terms of the election, does not have any impact. I mean, virtually no impact … Virtually never has it mattered.”
Given that Vance also accused Harris, the current vice-president, of “calling the shots” during the Biden administration, my conclusion is that he committed a massive, televised self-own in order to bolster party confidence in his ticket.
He doesn’t think he’s weird?
Arguably, Vance’s most indefensible position is that he isn’t the “weird” one in this election; the Democrats are. Refuting the viral allegation by vice-presidential nominee Tim Walz that he and Trump are “just weird” guys, Vance told CNN’s Dana Bash that Walz was engaging in “fundamentally schoolyard-bullying stuff” and “a little bit of projection.” Walz gave his wife “a nice, firm midwestern handshake” during the Philadelphia rally where Harris named him as her running mate, Vance said; that was a “weird” thing to do. Footage of the moment shows Walz grabbing his wife’s hand and pulling her into a hug, and conservatives have seized on it as an example of his weirdness. Critiquing a candidate’s marital chemistry probably isn’t a topic Republicans want to touch, considering Trump and Melania. Anyway, Vance went on:
I think what it is, is two people, Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, who aren’t comfortable in their own skin because they’re uncomfortable with their policy positions for the American people. And so they’re name-calling instead of actually telling the American people how they’re going to make their lives better. I think that’s weird, Dana, but look, they can call me whatever they want to.
It’s an especially interesting response given that Vance’s superior is infamous for calling his own opponents names: There’s “Little Marco” Rubio, for example; there’s “Sleepy Joe” Biden, and “Crazy Nancy” Pelosi, and now, “Kamabla” for Harris. No one, not even Vance, knows what “Kamabla” is supposed to mean. “I think the president, obviously, he loves to give people nicknames, and I think that he’s going to keep on doing that,” Vance explained. “I would be shocked if it’s the last nickname he gives her before the end of the election.”
It’s possible he simply has no idea how to land a joke.
During a recent campaign stop in Kenosha, Wisconsin, Vance told reporters he had a practice plan in place for his October 1 debate with Walz. “I found a good friend from back home who embellishes and lies a lot; I’m having him stand in for Tim Walz,” he said, inadvertently inviting us to fill in the blank with Trump’s name. Worse, this was just one in a string of clunkers delivered that week. While placing his order at Pat’s King of Steaks in Philadelphia a few days later, he asked why they didn’t stock Swiss cheese. “I don’t like Swiss cheese either, but everybody says it’s insulting,” Vance said. “Why do you guys hate Swiss cheese so much?”
In order to understand this question as an attempt at humor, one must remember that as a presidential candidate in 2004, John Kerry asked for Swiss at Pat’s, which has a set cheese menu of American, provolone, and Cheez Whiz. It may have been the fact that 20 years have elapsed since Kerry’s stumble, or it may have been Vance’s dead delivery; in any case, the Pat’s employee fulfilling Vance’s “whiz wit” order didn’t seem to register the joke, patiently explaining that “we don’t hate it, we just don’t use it.”
Also, the dolphin-porn debate.
Hot on the heels of the couch-sex rumor, a screenshot of a Vance tweet from February 2024 went viral. “Maybe the internet was a mistake,” he wrote above a clip headlined “woman gets violated by a dolphin and enjoys it.” Admittedly it takes a bit of a leap to get from there to “Vance loves dolphin porn,” which is where this meme cycle ultimately landed. Much like the couch-sex allegation before it, this is a difficult charge to definitively prove or disprove — though as Snopes notes, the tweet itself is real. Who knows how he got there, but ultimately this ranks as one of Vance’s milder public statements.
This post has been updated.
