10 of J.D. Vance's Most Controversial Moments So Far: From His 'Childless Cat Ladies' Remark to Criticizing Donald Trump

Donald Trump's running mate, J.D. Vance, was once a hater of the presidential candidate before joining his inner circle.

Prior to becoming Trump's VP pick, Vance liked harsh tweets criticizing the ex-POTUS in 2016 and 2017. According to CNN's KFile, he previously called the ex-president "an idiot" and "cynical a------."

Vance also wondered if Trump was "America's Hitler" before calling him a "cultural heroin."

Years later, he reversed his opinion of Trump and became his ally.

“I was certainly skeptical of Donald Trump in 2016, but President Trump was a great president and he changed my mind,” he said. “I think he changed the minds of a lot of Americans, because again he delivered that peace and prosperity.”

Speaking with Tucker Carlson on Fox News in 2021, the Ohio senator labeled women without biological children — including Kamala Harris — "childless cat ladies."

He added that at the time, the government was being led by people who were "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 delivered his address to the Intercollegiate Studies Institute in 2021, suggesting that people with children should be given more voting rights.

"Let's give votes to all children in this country, but let's give control over those votes to the parents of those children. 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.

Vance also noted at the time that people who do not have kids "lack an investment" in the U.S.'s future, so they should reportedly not have the same voice and rights as parents.

Vance sparked concern when he commented about the country's continuous aid to Ukraine during the Munich Security Conference in February.

"Given the realities that we face, the very real constraints in munitions and manpower, what is reasonable to accomplish and when do we actually think we're going to accomplish it? And my argument is, look, I think what's reasonable to accomplish is some negotiated peace," he suggested. "This will end in a negotiated peace. The question is when it ends in a negotiated peace and what that looks like."

He said the U.S. should shift its focus toward Asia, particularly the east side, instead.

Trump's VP pick had another misstep when he answered a question about whether laws should allow women who were victims of rape and incest to get abortions. During the 2021 interview, he said people should not view those pregnancies or births as "inconvenient."

“It’s not whether a woman should be forced to bring a child to term, it’s whether a child should be allowed to live, even though the circumstances of that child’s birth are somehow inconvenient or a problem to the society. The question really, to me, is about the baby," Vance confidently explained.

A resurfaced 2022 audio from Aimee Terese’s “Very Fine People” podcast also recorded Vance agreeing that women should be banned from crossing state lines to get abortions if Roe vs. Wade was overruled.

Decades before he entered politics, Vance shared a blog post in 2005 prior to his deployment to Iraq as a public relations specialist in the Marine Corps. In it, he opened up about his feelings of loneliness and homesickness while declaring he felt his "most female" on the day he was too emotional to watch Garden State.

"I couldn’t watch Garden State because New Jersey’s landscape is so much like Ohio’s, the music is so relevant to my life right now, and the story of a guy returning home, realizing that home isn’t what it used to be, etc. made me want to tear up," he wrote.

More Perfect Union writer Sean Morrow slammed Vance for being a "sensitive college boy making casually misogynist comments to explain his emotions" and a "wannabe far-right strongman."

In 2021, Vance said Alex Jones was a “better source of information than Rachel Maddow." Jones infamously made a conspiracy theory that the Sandy Hook massacre was a hoax.

“If you listen to Rachel Maddow every night, the basic worldview that you have is that MAGA grandmas who have family dinners on Sunday and bake apple pies for their family are about to start a violent insurrection against this country,” Vance said in his closed-door speech. “But if you listen to Alex Jones every day, you would believe that a transnational financial elite controls things in our country, that they hate our society, and oh, by the way, a lot of them are probably s-- perverts too.”

In his 2022 interview with the Gateway Pundit, Vance accused Joe Biden of trying to murder MAGA voters with a drug.

“If you wanted to kill a bunch of MAGA voters in the middle of the heartland, how better than to target them and their kids with this deadly fentanyl?” he said, adding, “It’s really a border crisis that has gone all over the country. It does look intentional. It’s like Joe Biden wants to punish the people who didn’t vote for him, and opening up the floodgates to the border is one way to do it.”

Vance found himself in hot water after sharing a February post featuring a cropped image of a woman and a dolphin alongside the caption, "Woman gets violated by a dolphin and enjoys it."

"Maybe the internet was a mistake," he wrote.

The bolded words "woman" and "dolphin" on the screenshots indicate that he searched for posts with those terms.

Following Simone Biles' Paris Olympics win, Vance's comment about the gymnast after stepping back from the Tokyo Olympics in 2021 also resurfaced.

After Biles withdrew from the competition, the politician called the athlete "weak" in his interview with Fox News.

"I think it reflects pretty poorly on our sort of therapeutic society that we try to praise people not for moments of strength, not for moments of heroism, but for their weakest moments," he said.

Vance added, “Being an athlete at that level is incredibly tough. A normal response in this moment would be to say: ‘It’s just a shame that she’s going through this. It’s a shame that she quit.’ But instead, what our press has done, I think, is turn this into this weird therapeutic moment. ‘Let’s praise her for doing this.’ And I think that’s really where the problem herein lies.”