JD Vance’s wife says his ‘childless cat ladies’ comment was a ‘quip’

Women offended by JD Vance's contention that the US is run by "childless cat ladies" should realise it was merely a "quip", the Republican vice-presidential nominee's wife, Usha Vance, claimed in an interview broadcast on Monday.

"I took a moment to look and actually see what he had said and tried to understand what the context was and all that, which is something that I really wish people would do a little bit more often," Vance told Fox News in remarks that doubled down on a controversy that has emerged as one of her husband's most persistent.

But JD Vance's three-word phrase lies at the heart of his rocky rollout as Donald Trump's running mate.

Speaking in 2021, a year shy of election to the US Senate in Ohio and when best known as the author of the bestseller Hillbilly Elegy, Vance told the then Fox News host Tucker Carlson that the US was run 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.

"It's just a basic fact - you look at [vice-president] Kamala Harris, [US transportation secretary] Pete Buttigieg, AOC [congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez] - 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?"

Buttigieg now has children, adopted with his husband, Chasten, in 2021.

Vance has come under sustained fire over a host of allegedly misogynistic remarks, including about women who choose not to have children or cannot have them at all.