The Father of Our Country never fathered a child. The man whose face is on the one-dollar bill (and who has a, let’s admit it, rather phallic monument) was not a biological parent. He did, however, become stepfather to Martha’s children when he married her, and he helped raise Martha Washington’s two children from a previous marriage, as well as her four grandchildren, and several nieces and nephews.
But that’s not good enough for JD (“Junior Devil”) Vance. J.D. Vance said Kamala Harris has no kids. Stepparents would like a word (WaPo).
In a video drawn from a 2021 interview on Fox News’s “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” J.D. Vance, now the GOP vice-presidential nominee, said that Harris and other prominent Democrats (including Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez) “don’t really have a direct stake” in the country’s future because they are “people without children.” In the clip, which has amassed more than 25 million views since it was shared Monday on X, Vance also refers to Democrats as “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices they’ve made.”
So now we have to take down the Washington Monument and rename the nation’s capital (“Trumptown”?) and take the Father of Our Country off our currency, because it turns out he wasn’t really a father, just a stepfather.
Others on the right have echoed Vance’s argument: Will Chamberlain, a conservative commentator and former Ron DeSantis staffer, posted on X on Sunday that a “really simple, underdiscussed reason why Kamala Harris shouldn’t be President” is that she has “no children.”
Washington wasn’t the only president to have no biological children of his own. Madison, Jackson, Polk, Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, Harding*, and Hoover also had no children, though most had stepchildren. (For some reason, Jackson isn’t on that list, so see here.) So now we also have to change the $20 bill (which we ought to do anyway; whatever happened to replacing Jackson with Harriet Tubman?).
(*Harding had a child out of wedlock, but denied it. A century later, DNA testing confirmed it was his.)
Anyway, back to Vance (or “vantz” — which is Yiddish for bedbug and is Yiddish slang for ‘obnoxious punk.” But I digress). Actually, back to the WaPo story:
According to a 2015 Pew Research Center report, 16 percent of American children are living in “blended families” — a household with a stepparent, stepsibling or half sibling — and 8 percent of children are living with a stepparent.
That’s a lot of voters to piss off all at once. In a way, you have to admire Vance’s talents — so long as it works for our side. Jessica Grose, writing in the NYT, warns about this: Attacking Kamala Harris for Not Having Kids Will Backfire.
This argument is also appallingly dismissive to so many adults who dote on the children in their lives and devote time, money and care to helping them grow, regardless of whether they are related by blood. It’s even more hurtful to people who really want to have children but are unable to.
Grose writes that it should be a requirement for presidential candidates to have compassion for people they’ve never met. (I’d add it should be a requirement for a candidate for any office, including that of human being.) What’s troubling is that Trump’s and Vance’s anti-empathy finds resonance with so many Americans (“many” being defined as any group larger than their immediate family). What will be reassuring is to see this resoundingly rejected in November.
