This weekend's postcard, and Kamala Harris v. two men at their worst

August 3-4, 2024

Vortices and clouds, Little Spokane River (2014)

J.D. Vance meets Trey Gowdy

Those who don’t closely follow politics may have forgotten Trey Gowdy, a lawyer and former Congressman from South Carolina. In Congress Gowdy was a hard-line Republican conservative, best known for chairing the House Select Committee on Benghazi that—in the run up to the 2016 presidential elections—spawned the Hillary Clinton email imbroglio. He returned to his legal practice in 2017 but also has a television gig with Fox News. Last Sunday, live on Fox News, Gowdy welcomed Trump’s vice presidential running mate, acclaimed author and U.S. senator from Ohio, J.D. Vance.

It was a very odd welcome, and not just by Fox standards. Gowdy, it turns out, is not a big J.D. Vance fan. His introduction of the man Donald Trump chose to be his 2024 running mate was a carefully scripted and withering indictment. This is how it began:

“Three years ago, then Senate candidate J.D Vance made a comment about quote, ‘childless cat ladies who are miserable and want others to be miserable too.’ It was implied those with children have a more vested interest in the future of the country. We have something called the rule of completeness in the courtroom which tells us not to accept snippets or out of context quotes, but rather consider everything said or written in full. So I've done that. I've watched that interview many times and you should too, in full and draw your own conclusions. When that interview surfaced, two things leaped to my mind. Those of us who talk for a living make mistakes. We say things that in hindsight we might phrase differently, or better, or not at all.”

Gowdy could have turned to Vance just then. But he just kept going, sharing the other thing that had leapt into his to mind. It turned out to be a genuinely touching story about a day at a D.C. airport when he’d met “two women desperately trying to get home to South America,” just as he was trying to get home to South Carolina. They shared a flight to Charlotte and then Vance helped the pair get a flight to Houston from where they could fly to their destination in South America, to visit their families before returning to their work in the U.S. They were both nuns, he explained, “childless, dedicated to God, love this country, living lives of service to others.”

“And it’s not just Catholic nuns,” Gowdy continued, as it became increasingly clear the long introduction was really an intervention of sorts, to shame Vance into apologizing, right there on Fox News, of all places.

“The American people are forgiving if we ask,” Gowdy said, quickly adding that he’d “heard from many women, most of whom are conservative and they would very much like to vote for President Trump and you, but senator they are disappointed.”

Vance had his own script. Just two days earlier, Vance told former Fox host Megyn Kelly he thought people were responding more to his “sarcasm” than the substance. But he quickly added that he was only “sorry” that the substance (about the controlling influence of miserable, childless cat-ladies) “is true.”

Invited by Gowdy’s remarkable introduction and invitation to repent, Vance stuck to his main talking point—which was that the whole controversy was the fault of Democrats who “take this thing out of context and blow it out of proportion, which is. what. they. always. do. Trey.”

J.D. Vance struggling to respond to Trey Gowdy’s withering introduction last Sunday

Vance’s inflection of “Trey” had a mocking emphasis to it, as if Gowdy had hearing or cognitive difficulties. Vance continued. “Of course” we should pray and have sympathy for people who don’t have children, he said, but “I still think that means we should be pro-family generally speaking as a party.”

Here, it’s worth inserting that in the same two year-old interview where he’d groused about miserable, childless women with cats Vance specifically called out Vice President Kamala Harris, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and New Jersey Senator Corey Booker as leaders of the “childless left.”

Herding Cats

Gowdy was stoic and unamused. He’d spent a carefully scripted-paragraph to make the point that he wasn’t quoting Vance out of context. He’d even encouraged his audience to listen to the whole of what Vance had told former Fox News host Tucker Carlson in the 2021 interview “and draw your own conclusions.”

The interview spiraled downward from there, with Gowdy naming childless Republican luminaries and Vance becoming more exasperated and piling on with the demonstrable lie that Kamala Harris “is calling for an end of the child tax credit.” (She isn’t.)

Nor was it true that his critics on “the left” had “radically taken this out of context and in fact aggressively lied about what I've said.”

Actually, they’d just aggressively quoted him—in context.

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