Trump’s ghoulish VP pick is awful at selling the GOP’s terrifyingly regressive platform. He’s even worse at taking potshots at VP Harris and her exciting presidential campaign.
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Early last year, I said goodbye to my beloved Whiskey Bearcat, a delightfully tubby tabby. I met him as a kitten, in 2005, during the week that Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans. Whiskey was one of hundreds of animals that had been evacuated from Louisiana to Dallas, Texas, in advance of the devastating storm. I didn’t know he was mine at first, but he knew he was mine. Right there in the shelter, he scrambled up my boot-cut, low-rise jeans and straight into my heart.
My salty, striped boy had a pretty exciting life for a house cat: He made round-trip flights between Texas and New York City while I was completing my graduate studies, plus a half-dozen road trips between Texas and California, on top of supervising the addition of two more cats, a puppy, and a husband to the household. I called him the “10,000-mile cat.” Whenever and wherever I opened his carrier door—whether it was in a roadside La Quinta or a new apartment—he cottoned to his new home, as if he’d been there a million years already. He was the true boss of our household, greeting everyone from my best friends to the maintenance guy with insistent demands for butt-pats. The dog grew to be three times Whiskey’s size but always gave him a wide berth, even as Whiskey was a champion cuddler with his feline friends.
I spent 18 years of my life—the whole, really, of my post-college existence—with Whiskey by my side. I slept almost every night of those years with him curled into the crook of my shoulder, my little spoon, purring hard and loud.
This, to wanna-billy vice-presidential candidate J.D. Vance, is a “miserable” life. That’s what Vance told Fox News when he ran for the U.S. Senate just three years ago, saying in an interview that “childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives” not only have run America into the ground already, but want to “make the rest of the country miserable too.”
What about my love for Whiskey Bearcat was a misery? Which part of my life—that Whiskey so enriched—was ever miserable because of him, or because of my devotion to him? The idea is so preposterous that I struggle to comprehend it. What a pathetic worldview, to suggest that caring for a pet is a damaging mark against a person, worthy of derision.
Vance’s remarks included digs at Vice-President Kamala Harris (who’s a stepmom), Mayor Pete Buttigieg (who adopted twins with his husband), and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who like me (and VP Harris) is one of nearly 22 million American women who’ve never given birth. Indeed, more Americans than ever are opting out of having kids, for all kinds of reasons—not least among them the GOP’s dogged decimation of, and refusal to even entertain, the kinds of social safety nets and familial and workplace policies that make having children feel possible in a world facing devastating climate disaster.
After his scornful rant resurfaced, Vance tried to walk back his words, saying he’s “got nothing against cats.” Oh, okay! Thanks for clarifying, buddy—you’re fine with cats, you just think that “childless” people, especially women, are a blight on the country. That’s much better. Masterful gambit, sir.
Vance can flail all he wants as he tries to claw back the feline vote, but the policies he supports speak for themselves, and everyone knows it. Vance is a gutless stooge, certainly, but his rabidly anti-abortion views and unbridled misogyny are par for his party. It’s all right there in Project 2025, the 900-page Christian Nationalist manifesto that, as Jude Doyle put it in Xtra*, would engineer an America where, by government mandate, the only family that matters is a “straight, white family where the father exercises unquestionable authority over wife and children alike.”
This Republican vision for America’s future is in every way a return to the past: to a time before marriage equality, legalized abortion, contraception, integration, the ADA, the Voting Rights Act, and the list goes on. It’s no wonder that a “We won’t go back” chant broke out during Kamala Harris’s first presidential campaign rally last week. It’s not just Harris’s candidacy or her policies that serve as clap-back to Republican regression, it’s her very existence as a warm, goofy Generation Joneser, as a blended-family “Momala” beloved by her stepkids, as a Black, Indian-American woman with a blockbuster career, as the first woman Vice President of the United States.
What is “childless cat lady” in the face of all of that? To Kamala Harris, to people in blended families, to queer families, to chosen families, or any of us fellow travelers in the no-kids, cat-loving life? And indeed, to the many millions in so-called “traditional” families, who are, as all of us should be able to do, simply living life on their own terms? Let Vance and his cohort of dour and dreary patriarchs spin it however they want; let the joy we take in lives well-lived drive them mad. Let them stand in the corner and scowl while we dance to Charli XCX and Beyoncé.
If “childless cat lady” ever had any bite to it at all, Vance’s pissy hand-wringing about other people’s reproductive decisions has defanged it entirely. He’s managed to shine the brightest possible spotlight on the contrast between the GOP’s creepy parade of large adult trolls and the relatable, whip-smart Harris, who, in a matter of days, injected much-needed optimism into a tiresome and often terrifying election season. And he has no one but himself to blame for it. Vance and his party are positively seething with bitterness—witness the “mass deportations now” signs from the GOP convention—and resentment of the many millions of people whose lives look different than theirs.
I would suggest that perhaps Vance could learn a thing or two from us childless cat ladies about the compassion and gratification that comes from loving a pet, but I wouldn’t wish a life with someone as spiritually ugly as Vance on any defenseless animal. Instead, he will have to learn the error of his ways by other means. Perhaps, if we are lucky and persistent enough over the next three months, by way of a defeat at the polls that makes him realize he was the one trying to push his own small-minded, milquetoast misery on everyone else.