Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) brushed off the blowback he is facing from Democrats and some Republicans since being tapped as former President Trump's vice presidential pick, calling the criticism the "price of entry" to be on the Republican presidential ticket.
"I knew that when I came out of the gate there was going to be a couple of days of positive media coverage and then immediately, they would go and attack me over everything that I had ever said in my life," he told NBC News in a Tuesday interview.
Vance said he does not believe he has disappointed Trump despite the backlash.
“The price of entry of being on the national ticket and giving me an opportunity to govern is you have to … take the shots, and so I sort of expected it," he added. "I think that, frankly, the people who’ve made a lot of money and acquired a lot of power screwing the country up are not going to go easily.”
The Ohio Republican has faced ongoing criticism from Democrats in recent weeks over a series of resurfaced comments, especially a 2021 remark he made criticizing Democratic leaders who don't have biological children.
He told then-Fox News host Tucker Carlson the country was being 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.”
Vance defended the “childless cat ladies” remarks last week, calling it a “sarcastic comment” and pivoting to attack Democrats as “anti-family.”
He stood by the remarks on Tuesday, telling NBC, “What I was criticizing and continue to criticize is a particular neurosis in American leadership that I think leads people to say crazy things, like you shouldn’t have children because climate change is a threat to the future."
“Climate change may very well be a problem, but it is not a problem that should motivate people to not have families. And I think that attitude is quite damaging. It’s quite destructive," he said.
Vance was indirectly referencing comments Vice President Harris made in September, when she argued the large young voter turnout in 2020 was in part due to their concerns about climate change. A clip of those comments resurfaced over the weekend by some Republicans who baselessly claimed Harris was suggesting young people should not have children amid rising fears over the impact of climate change.
Some Democrats have labelled Vance and his comments as "weird," though he told Fox News on Sunday his feelings are not hurt by the label.
The Ohio senator also came under security from some of his GOP colleagues in the upper chamber. Some Republican senators told The Hill Trump should have picked a woman or a person of color to help broaden his appeal beyond his hardcore base of supporters, while some questioned if Trump ignored his political advisers and instead listened to his son Donald Trump Jr. and conservative media host Tucker Carlson in picking Vance.
Some Republicans in the House expressed similar concerns regarding Vance's foreign policy stances, lack of experience and inability to broaden the Republican coalition beyond Trump's base.
When asked by NBC about the policy areas he is interested in as a vice president, Vance said, "My attitude is I want to be a good public servant."
“I’ll help out wherever I’m asked to help out. Certainly, I’d love to be given some influence over our border policy, and I’d basically do the exact opposite of what Kamala Harris did," he added, echoing the Trump campaign's repeated attack against Harris's handling of the country's southern border.
“Our adversaries,” Vance added later, “are licking their chops and the world is in disarray because of weak American leadership.”
However, Vance said the campaign was not making a concerted effort to frame Harris, who would be the first woman president, as weak.
“I wouldn’t say there’s some particular effort to tag her as weak,” he said. “If there’s a particular label we want the American people to be aware of, it’s that she’s an ultra-liberal.”
