Vice presidential candidate JD Vance agreed with a 2020 podcast host that “a postmenopausal woman’s entire purpose” is to help raise her grandchildren.
The comments came during an appearance on “The Portal” podcast hosted by Eric Weinstein, then managing director of the investment firm founded by billionaire Vance backer Peter Thiel. Vance was talking about his wife, Usha Vance, taking a year-long leave of absence from work to care for their newborn son.
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“You can kind of see the effect they have on him, having them around. They spoil him, they do all the classic things grandparents do with their grandchildren,” Vance said. “But having them around makes him a much better person.”
“In theory, that’s what postmenopausal women are for,” Weinstein said.
Vance agreed with the statement in the middle of the statement. Weinstein later said that having grandparents around to help care for a newborn was “a strange and unknown feature of marrying an Indian woman.” Vance, whose in-laws immigrated from India, did not dispute the statement.
A spokesperson for the Ohio senator, who officially became Donald Trump’s running mate at the Republican National Convention last month, denied Vance agreed with the statement.
“The press is dishonestly putting words in JD’s mouth. Of course he disagrees with what the host said,” the spokesperson told The Daily Beast. “JD was responding to the first part of the host’s sentence, thinking he was going to say, ‘That’s the whole point of spending time with your grandparents.’”
“It’s shameful that the media is lying about JD and not holding him accountable for the skyrocketing prices of groceries and basic necessities caused by Kamala Harris’ policies, the devastation at our southern border, and the historic overdose epidemic.”
The comments add another obstacle to Vance’s efforts to drum up support for Trump ahead of the November election. Last month, his past comments that Harris had been lumped into the left’s description of a “childless cat lady” and that she had a “miserable” life caused a furore in the campaign.
But Democratic organizers embraced the name and used it to drum up more support for her campaign.
