‘Racist’ Mountain Dew, cat ladies — and is that eyeliner? The ‘weird’ times of JD Vance

It took eight years for a Silicon Valley-backed author and venture capitalist to ditch his very public criticism of Donald Trump; get elected to the Senate with Trump’s help; endorse widely derided ideas about women and childbirth; then get in line for next vice president of the United States.

Democrats have summed up JD Vance with one word: “weird.”

Kamala Harris’ campaign called him a “creep.” Minnesota Governor Tim Walz said Republicans have “weird people” and “weird ideas” on their side. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said Trump probably regrets hiring a “weird” running mate.

Since his debut, Vance has faced nosediving approval ratings — and Democrats suggest those “weird” comments might have something to do with it.

Idiot, morally reprehensible, noxious, and America’s Hitler — Vance made it pretty clear what he thought about Trump before running for office.

In an April 2016 New York Times op-ed, Vance argued that Trump was “unfit” for office. That year, he also sent a message to his law school roommate saying that he was going “back and forth between thinking that Trump is a cynical asshole … or that he’s America’s Hitler.”

“He’s just a bad man. A morally reprehensible human being,” he wrote to another friend.

“There’s definitely an element of Donald Trump’s base of support that has elements in racism, xenophobia,” Vance told PBS. Speaking to NPR, he called Trump “noxious.”

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He also liked a tweet labeling Trump “one of USA’s most hated, villainous, douchey celebs.”

“What an idiot,” Vance wrote in another, now-deleted tweet. After the release of the Access Hollywood tape — in which Trump is heard admitting to grabbing women by the genitals in 2005, just weeks before the 2016 election — Vance wrote in another now-deleted tweet: “Fellow Christians, everyone is watching us when we apologize for this man. Lord help us.”

Vance also suggested that he believed a woman who accused Trump of groping her in the 1970s.

“At the end of the day, do you believe Donald Trump, who always tells the truth? Just kidding,” he told MSNBC. “Or do you believe that woman on the tape?”

Vance appeared to have a change of heart about Trump during his 2022 run for the Senate when he secured Trump’s endorsement.

“Originally, JD was probably not for me, but he didn’t know me,” Trump told Fox News this month. “And then when we got to know each other, he liked me maybe more than anybody liked me.”

Today, Vance believes Trump is “synonymous with luxury and with beauty in the real estate world” and “America’s last best hope.”

Vance has previously supported outlawing abortion nationwide and blocking women from traveling from anti-abortion states to seek care where in places where it remains legal.

On the Very Fine People podcast in January 2022, Vance said he “would like abortion to be illegal nationally” and was “sympathetic” to the idea that there would be a “federal response” to prevent women from traveling to abortion-protected states to get care.

“Let’s say 2024, and every day, George Soros sends a 747 to Columbus to load up disproportionately Black women to get them to go have abortions in California,” he said. “If that happens, do you need some federal response to prevent it from happening, because it’s really creepy. And I’m pretty sympathetic to that, actually.”

During a 2021 appearance on then-Fox News personality Tucker Carlson’s program, Vance claimed that “we are 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 if you look at Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, [Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez] — the entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children,” he added. “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?”

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He was widely criticized for those remarks at the time, and he hasn’t been able to escape them as Trump’s running mate, even during clean-up interviews with right-wing networks.

In an interview with Megyn Kelly on July 26, Vance claimed that the “cat ladies” remark was “sarcastic,” adding that “people are focusing so much on the sarcasm and not on the substance … and the substance of what I said, Megyn — I’m sorry, it is true.”

Vance didn’t back away from his remarks in another Fox News interview on July 28 and claimed that the “left has increasingly become explicitly antichild and antifamily.”

He said that “direct offspring are not necessary to be fully invested in the future of this country,” but added that becoming a parent “really does transform your perspective.”

“So this is not a criticism, and was never a criticism, of everybody without children. That is a lie of the left. It is a criticism of the increasingly antiparent and antichild attitude of the left,” Vance said. “I’m going to keep on calling that out, because I think it’s important for parents to have a voice.”

He called Trump a “real defender of parents and families.”

Vance is a self-described “natalist” who is among the Silicon Valley CEOs and influential right-wing figures obsessed with pumping up birthrates. He has also suggested that people without children should be taxed at higher rates, have their votes count less, and not be in positions of political leadership.

In a speech to the Intercollegiate Studies Institute’s Future of American Political Economy Conference in July 2021, Vance said Vice President Harris and other Democratic officials on the “childless left” have “no physical commitment to the future of this country.”

“Not having enough children” is a “civilizational crisis,” said Vance, echoing tech CEOs like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel who suggest the world is on the brink of collapse as birthrates decline.

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Vance has also argued that parents should have “more power” at the voting booth.

“When you go to the polls in this country as a parent, you should have more power — you should have more of an ability to speak your voice in our democratic republic — than people who don’t have kids,” he said.

Americans should “face the consequences and the reality: 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,” according to Vance.

At his solo debut on the campaign trail in Ohio last week, the internet pounced on Vance’s half-baked idea for a joke - that Democrats call something “racist” so often that they would call a soda “racist.”

“It is the weirdest thing to me. Democrats say it is racist to believe — well, they say it’s racist to do anything,” Vance told the crowd. “I had a Diet Mountain Dew yesterday and I’m sure they’re going to call that racist too.”

“It’s good,” he said, laughing at his own joke, which appeared to land with a single clap from the crowd.

A few days later, the campaign shared a “backstage” video showing the “ton of crap” to eat and drink - including a stash of Diet Mountain Dew.

Jokes and online speculation about whether Vance wears eyeliner have spilled out into the presidential race.

TikTok artist and drag queen June Rogers has even started a series of makeup tutorials based around achieving Vance’s look.