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Wacky vice presidents are a long Republican tradition
JD Vance’s bitterly misjudged ‘childless cat ladies’ broadside broke the internet — but lightweight, bizarre or even downright dangerous vice-presidential picks are the norm for Republicans, writes LINDA PENTZ GUNTER
Republican vice presidential candidate Senator JD Vance takes the stage with his wife Usha Vance during a rally in his home town of Middletown, Ohio, July 22, 2024
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THERE should not have been quite as much surprise over presidential contender Donald Trump’s pick of JD Vance as his vice-presidential running mate. After all, the Republican Party has a pretty solid track record of selecting lightweights with bizarre views or quirky traits for the second-fiddle role.
Richard Nixon’s vice-president was Spiro Agnew, who metaphorically put his foot in his mouth so many times with a succession of verbal gaffes that he became better known as the butt of jokes, including one that suggested: “The only time Agnew opens his mouth is to change shoes.”
Early into Nixon’s second term, Agnew was forced to resign after being charged with accepting bribes and falsifying federal tax returns.
Enter vice-president Gerald Ford, who also rose to the presidency after Nixon’s second term was cut short by his resignation over the Watergate scandal.
Ford became a regular character on the satirical US television programme Saturday Night Live, portrayed there by comic actor Chevy Chase, whose pratfalls were inspired by an incident in 1975 when Ford slipped down the steps of the presidential plane Air Force One after it landed in Austria.
George HW Bush chose Dan Quayle as his running mate, a man who couldn’t spell potato — he most famously corrected a Spelling Bee contestant by adding an “e” on the end.
Quayle also insisted he was the second coming of John F Kennedy, leading his Democratic opponent, Lloyd Bentsen, to famously rebuke him during a 1988 vice-presidential debate with the flattening retort: “I knew Jack Kennedy. Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine. Senator, you’re no Jack Kennedy.”
George W Bush, who became US president in 2001, brought on Dick Cheney as his second in command. While vice-president, Cheney shot and wounded then 78-year-old Texas attorney, Harry Whittington during a hunting expedition, apparently mistaking him for a quail, the quarry they were seeking.
Both men insisted the shooting was an accident but Whittington later suffered a non-fatal heart attack and atrial fibrillation due to lead shot lodged in or near his heart as a result of the hunting incident. (He died in February 2023 age 95).
Trump’s vice-president during his one-term presidency was former Indiana governor Mike Pence, a man apparently so Oedipal, according to Rolling Stone magazine, that he calls his wife “mother.” (The Pence camp denies this).
While governor, the homophobic Christian passed a controversial “religious freedom” law that discriminated against the LGBTQ community, leading to event cancellations and boycotts and the withdrawal of business contracts that cost the state millions of dollars in actual or potential revenue.
And so it was a moment of utter glee in the Democratic camp when a 2021 television interview with Vance surfaced in which he described Democrats as “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.”
Naming Kamala Harris among others, now the Democratic presidential nominee, Vance lamented that “the entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children.”
Childless comedian Chelsea Handler immediately shot back at Vance for suggesting that adults without children should have their voting rights curtailed and pay higher taxes.
She reminded Vance facetiously that “no president in the history of the United States has ever been a mother,” before adding that “all us childless cat and dog ladies are going to go from childless and crushing it to childless and crushing you in November.”
Cats already own the internet of course — and beyond. The prestigious American Film Institute even has an annual CatVideoFest described as “a joyous communal experience, only available in theatres.”
But nothing could quite compete with the opportunity gifted by Vance. The internet lit up, themed T-shirts mushroomed, TikTok exploded and a whole new anti-Trump movement of childless cat ladies and their allies was born.
Linda Pentz Gunter is a writer living in Takoma Park, Maryland (with two cats).
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