Decoding JD Vance

He wants more kids in society -- but thinks it's up to women to take care of them.

If you haven’t yet listened to it, this interview between Lulu Garcia-Navarro of the New York Times and vice presidential candidate JD Vance is well worth hearing in full. It is at once disarming and terrifying. Vance, unlike the man at the top of his ticket, speaks like a competent, intelligent person. He comes across as smart and thoughtful. He appears to have moments of real empathy and humanity.

And then you tune into what he’s actually saying (and refusing to say).

One of the more revealing moments of the conversation was in what initially sounds like a nice story. Vance talks about his conversion to Catholicism, and he gives a thoughtful answer about what drew him to the church. And he said his wife Usha, who grew up Hindu but fairly secular, was incredibly supportive: “she was, like, really into it,” Vance said. “Meaning, she thought that thinking about the question of converting and getting baptized and becoming a Christian, she thought that they were good for me, in sort of a good-for-your-soul kind of way. And I don’t think I would have ever done it without her support, because I felt kind of bad about it, right? Like, you didn’t sign up for a weekly churchgoer. I feel terrible for my wife because we go to church almost every Sunday, unless we’re on the road.”

That’s a really lovely answer! And it illustrates what sounds like a pretty lovely marriage between two considerate people who want the other to be happy; they compromise, and they also recognize when they are asking a lot of their partner.

Then Garcia-Navarro asks if Usha has converted as well, and Vance says this:

No she hasn’t. That’s why I feel bad about it. She’s got three kids. Obviously I help with the kids, but because I’m kind of the one going to church, she feels more responsibility to keep the kids quiet in the church. And I just felt kind of bad. Like, oh, you didn’t sign up to marry a weekly churchgoer. Are you OK with this? And she was more than OK with it, and that was a big part of the confirmation that this was the right thing for me.

Did you miss it?

She’s got three kids. Obviously I help with the kids, but because I’m kind of the one going to church, she feels more responsibility to keep the kids quiet in the church.

I actually hit pause and replayed this section because it was so bizarre. To be clear, Usha’s three kids are JD Vance’s three kids. He did not marry a single mom. These are his own children. And yet he describes them as his wife’s. He says he “helps” with them (have you ever heard a mother say she “helps” with her own offspring?). And my head really spun at the “she feels more responsibility” comment, which just makes no sense. He’s the one who wants to go to church, and to whom this community is important. She’s there to support him. Why would she feel more responsibility to keep the kids quiet? Wouldn’t he want to repay the favor she’s doing him by doing more to make the whole experience easier for everyone?

The answer is that she’s the woman, and so of course the kids are her job.

This is fundamental to understand about JD Vance: He is obsessed with the idea of the traditional family, which means couples absolutely must have children, but those children are the mother’s responsibility to raise. The father’s role is one of authority and provision, but not real engagement or anything resembling equal care.

Garcia-Navarro also asks Vance about his “childless cat ladies” comment, and his clarification is certainly clarifying. He didn’t mean to insult people who couldn’t have children, he said. But he definitely did mean to insult people who don’t have children for reasons he thinks are dumb, like concerns about climate change. He claims — bizarrely — that political leaders are telling people not to have children because of climate change, which isn’t something I have ever heard a politician say. He calls that view sociopathic and deranged.

There is very little in the way of actual evidence that significant numbers of young people are forgoing children because of climate change; it honestly seems to be one of those justifications people give because it sounds more selfless than “I just don’t want children” (which gets you judged by people like JD Vance). Climate change isn’t a non-issue in childbearing decisions, but it is at most a distant star in a galaxy of much more salient reasons. I sincerely doubt that there are more than a tiny, tiny number of people who actually really want children, but deny themselves that pleasure primarily because of climate fears.

Surely JD Vance knows that. But that’s not the point. The point is that JD Vance thinks something is wrong with you if you just don’t want kids. He wasn’t going to say that on a New York Times podcast because he doesn’t want to further alienate young women. So he picked a reason for forgoing childbearing that we hear floating about, but that doesn’t really describe the vast majority of child-free people’s decisions. He could refuse to fully walk back his comments and continue to claim that intentionally forgoing children is sociopathic, but put a cover of plausible deniability on it.

When Vance talks about abortion, it closes this intellectual loop that ties “kids are a mother’s responsibility” to “women who don’t want kids are deranged” to “we must force women to have children.” Perhaps the darkest thing about Vance is that he actually does understand why many women choose to terminate pregnancies — he just doesn’t care, the same way he doesn’t care that women may not desire kids. “I knew a lot of young women who had abortions,” he told Garcia-Navarro, and “almost always, it was motivated by this view that that was the only choice really available to them. That if they had had the baby, it would have destroyed their relationships, their family, their education, their career.”

Does Vance then pivot to talking about how he might help to ameliorate any of these very real penalties that so many women experience when they have unplanned (and sometimes even planned) pregnancies? No. He says that “we want to be pro-family in the fullest sense of the word” and “promote more people choosing life,” which means… letting states set their own abortion laws. But also a national ban after 15 weeks, which he supported, and also a wholesale national ban, which he supported in 2022 but maybe no longer does now that we’re in a “different world” (one in which Republicans are losing and JD Vance wants to win, I guess).

The answer was nonsense; Vance simply dodged the question of what he actually believes the law should be. But that first part — that many women have abortions because they correctly assess that they have much to lose if they become mothers or have additional children before they’re ready — tells us a lot about Vance. He knows these women are right when they assess their own lives; there is plenty of research at this point about the ways in which unplanned pregnancies can be profoundly disruptive, and the ways in which women who are able to get abortions wind up significantly better off than women who are denied them. He wants to deny women abortions anyway. The same way he doesn’t believe there is any good excuse for a woman not having children, he doesn’t believe that a woman’s other aspirations — her relationships, her education, her career, her existing family, her life — matter all that much.

You’ll note that Vance, for all of his obsession with children and families, did not quit his job to raise his own children (he relied on his mother-in-law for that). He did not have as many children as God gave him; he seems to have carefully planned the family he desired. He did not sacrifice his career or his education or his political ambitions; only his wife has done that. He is obsessed with having children, but he doesn’t see even his own children as primarily his responsibility. Children are an idea to him, part of an ideal society he wants to build — one in which men are, like Vance, not actually equally responsible for the raising of children. Raising children is women’s work — and it’s not labor we can justify forgoing.

None of this comes out of ignorance. It comes out of seeing and understanding just how difficult JD Vance’s ideal world would be for women, and wanting to impose those difficulties anyway.

The tone of the interview, though, hardly sounded his harsh. And that’s what was so jarring about it: It sounded like a nice, normal conversation unless you really paid attention to the content. But sometimes, the mask slipped.

Early in the interview, Vance talks about his law school friend Sophia, who shared some of their old emails with the Times. He says he was hurt by her decision to share private correspondence but he still loves her and misses her friendship. But when he starts talking about the issue over which they split — gender-affirming care for minors — it’s almost like he remembers he’s speaking to an audience instead of a fellow human being, and his voice turns hard and flinty. You should listen to it yourself, but here’s the relevant part:

I am very sad about what happened between me and Sofia. Going back to 2013, 2014, she’s my friend, she’s transgender. I didn’t fully understand it, I just thought: I love this person, and I care about her, and I don’t have to sort of agree with every medical decision that she makes or even understand it to say, well, I love you, I care about you. I’m still going to hang out with you, we’re still going to talk about football and be friends. And we had this conversation — can’t remember when it was, maybe around the time of my Senate campaign, maybe before. But I had children at that point, and we were talking about gender-affirming care for minors. I think a more honest way to say it is not “gender-affirming care” but “chemical experimentation on minors.” And my affection for her didn’t mean that I thought this was a reasonable thing to do to 11-year-old children who are confused.

The bolding is mine, and that is the moment when you can hear Vance’s Trump campaign brain click on, and he shifts from one part of the plan — come across as human and empathetic — to the other, which is to use right-wing phraseology and not say anything that will challenge his base’s view of him as a tough opponent of transgender healthcare. He knows he needs to sound empathetic to trans people for a New York Times audience; he also knows he needs to sound judgmental of and disgusted by them for his own voters. Hearing him shift between these two selves — the human self and the Trump-lite self — is chilling.

This is who JD Vance is: A chameleon. He’s a man who has had to make himself into many different people, and in many ways that’s an admirable skill. But he seems to have ceded a moral core for a hard-right philosophical one. Where there perhaps used to be real empathy there is now the practiced miming of empathy. Where there were once hard moral lines — Trump is America’s Hitler, to use Vance’s own words — there are now porous borders. And as Vance’s moral center became more malleable, his very specific philosophy around family, children, and female obligation seems to have hardened.

xx Jill