JD GETS CATCALLED

Trump Interviews Replacements For Vance

He’s okay with a cat lady. How about Catwoman?

“I could be your MAGA catnip.” Catwoman (Julie Newmar), Batman TV series, 1966–68. Photo credited to Newmar on Flickr.

Donald Trump, alarmed by the low poll numbers for running mate J. D. Vance,¹ has been interviewing candidates to replace him. “I hate to do it,” said Trump. “JD hasn’t done anything wrong. Look at it this way: I said I like to grab women by their pussies. JD only wants to turn them into puppy mills.² And put bitches who don’t do it in the dog house.”

Senator J. D. “Couch Caulker” Vance. Caricature by DonkeyHotey on Flickr.

Senator Vance’s historic unpopularity is due to his novel views regarding the role of women in society. Vance is a pronatalist.³ That’s someone who:

• Is aware that populations are declining throughout the world,⁴ even in the ten most populous countries — India, China, the United States, Indonesia, Pakistan, Nigeria, Brazil, Bangladesh, Russia, and Ethiopia,⁵ and
• Believes countries need high birth rates to avoid labor shortages, economic stagnation, and social instability.

Some countries have increased their birth rates by giving working families⁶ means to care for children they otherwise couldn’t afford. For instance, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and Finland established networks of inexpensive child-care centers, enacted parental leave laws, and required reasonable workplace accommodations for breastfeeding mothers.⁷

Vance doesn’t like those policies. For example, he has said he wants to provide families with a $5,000 annual tax credit for each child under the age of seventeen.⁸ That’s hardly an incentive to have one. In Vance’s home state of Ohio, $5,000 would pay for just six months of daycare.⁹ That would leave cash-strapped parents with two choices: cut back on food and electricity to cover the difference, or free-range the kid for six months. Fortunately, Vance saved them from having to choose. He skipped the vote for the tax credit, and his fellow Republican senators killed it.¹⁰

Vance prefers to mock and shame women into making babies. He’s declared that a real American woman is a mom. That said, she’s not necessarily a mom.¹¹ Not if her child was:

• Adopted (Vance has asserted that Vice President Kamala Harris is “without children”, despite having two stepkids);¹²
• Conceived through artificial insemination with someone who wasn’t her husband;
• Born by a surrogate; or
• Raised by two moms.

In Vance’s opinion, any woman who isn’t a mom, or doesn’t conform to his vision of one, is undeserving of respect. She’s just a dried-up old “cat lady” who’s “miserable at their own life and the choices that they’ve made.”¹²

Granted, Vance admits to knowing only one cat lady. That’s a colleague in the Senate. He’s a pudgy old crone who shed his principles, morals, and self-respect when the Republican Party got a MAGA makeover. Who sucks up to the skanky orange tomcat that treats everyone like kitty litter. Who swallows the tomcat’s hairballs without gagging, and hocks them up without shame. “That guy’s gotta feel miserable about his life and the choices he’s made,” said Vance. “Thus, the Senator from South Carolina is a stereotypical cat lady.”

“Cat Lady” Lindsey Graham. Caricature by DonkeyHotey on Flickr.

Vance’s remarks about women tanked his ratings in the polls. But though women were offended, it was cat lovers who did the tanking.

Cat lovers are a large and powerful voting block. They account for forty-six million households.¹³ That’s thirty-five percent of American homes.¹⁴ Like their cats, they tend to be agreeable, inquisitive, instinctive, and neurotic.¹⁵ And one thing more: cat lovers don’t take no dog crap from no one — especially a MAGA mutt.

Thanks to cat lovers, Vance has achieved the lowest approval rating for a vice presidential candidate in modern history.¹⁶

• Lower than John Edwards, John Kerry’s running mate in 2004, who lost to George W. Bush and Dick Cheney.
• Lower than Paul Ryan, who ran with Mitt Romney in 2012, and was defeated by Barack Obama and Joe Biden.
• Lower than Sarah Palin, John McCain’s running mate in 2008, who also lost to Obama and Biden.

Trump was alarmed by Vance’s poll numbers. He’s only running even with Kamala Harris in the polls. It had to be Vance’s fault; what other reason could there be? So Trump has been vetting potential replacements at his golf course in Bedminster, New Jersey.

The MAGA Cougar Who Wants To Be Trump’s Kitty

Trump’s first interview was with someone as qualified to be VP as he is to be president: Sarah Palin, former governor of Alaska.

Sarah “I wanna be your MAGA hag” Palin. Caricature by DonkeyHotey on Flickr.

Trump began by asking Palin if she wanted the job. She gave him the same eloquent answer she’d given to McCain when he made the same offer in 2008: “Yup yup!”¹⁷ Though like Trump, she wished “somebody [would] answer for me what the VP does.”¹⁸

Trump quickly ascertained that Palin, like himself, was an “extremely stable genius.”¹⁹

• She shared Trump’s commitment to America’s friends. “We’ve got to stand with our North Korean allies,”²⁰ said Palin.
• She claimed the rulings by Trump’s Supreme Court justices were memorable. That said, she couldn’t remember any of them. “Well, let’s see,” she said. “There’s — of course — in the great history of American rulings there have been rulings.”²¹
• Like Trump, Palin was an expert on American history. “When it comes to defending the rights of Americans to own assault rifles,” she said to Trump, “you’re like Revolutionary War hero Paul Revere. Paul warned the British that they weren’t gonna be takin’ away our arms by ringin’ those bells and makin’ sure as he’s ridin’ his horse through town to send those warning shots and bells that we were gonna be secure and we were gonna be free and we’re gonna be armed.”²²
• That brought up another thing Palin has in common with Trump: her awesome command of the English language. “If I’m your running mate,” she said, “I’ll convince voters to refudiate Harris’s hopey-changey agenda and get them wee-wee’d up for Trump.”²³
• Palin assured Trump he could dispose of his legal problems after he’s elected. “Your Department of Law there in the White House will look at the things you’ve been charged with and throw them out.”²⁴ (Actually, there’s no “Department of Law” in the White House. But that’s all right: Palin’s heart was in the right place.)
• Palin counseled Trump to ignore polls which suggest he’s losing to Harris. “Polls are only good for strippers and cross-country skiers.”²⁵

Trump was on the verge of announcing right then that Palin would replace Vance. Then she began to brag about the things “we’re going to do in a Palin and McCain administration.”²⁶ That killed her chances of being Trump’s running mate. It was bad enough she mentioned McCain, a former Navy combat pilot who’d been shot down during the Vietnam War and imprisoned for six years in a North Vietnamese POW camp. Even so, Trump mocked McCain for being a “dummy”, and “not a war hero.” “[People think] he’s a war hero because he was captured. I like people that weren’t captured.”²⁷

Far worse in Trump’s mind: Palin gave herself top billing on the ticket.

Hans And Franz Will Pump Trump Up

Next, Trump interviewed two people who had the skills to pursue his most important initiatives as president.

The first of those was to intimidate people who’d mocked his orange-pudding puss and his urine-colored comb-over. Oh, and to shut up all the strippers he’d had sex with who’d laughed at his small — let’s say “hands.” Trump figured the VP best qualified for that undertaking was Oddjob, Auric Goldfinger’s Korean henchman in the 1964 James Bond movie Goldfinger.

Oddjob caddying for Trump at his Bedminster golf club. Photo by Joan Hennam-Foden on Flickr.

Trump’s other scheme was to get out of paying the legions of lawyers²⁸ and battalions of bankers²⁹ he owes upwards of half a billion dollars.

The best VP for that job would be Gort, the eight-foot interstellar robot “enforcer” in the 1951 film The Day The Earth Stood Still. Trump figured Gort could use his energy beam to zap his creditors. And on Election Day in 2028, Gort could vaporize Democratic ballots so Trump could win a third term.

Gort (left) with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. at Trump rally near Area 51 in Nevada. Photo by FranMoff on Flickr.

The good news for Trump was that Oddjob and Gort were Republicans. The bad news was neither was qualified to be vice president. According to the Constitution, the VP³⁰ must be a natural-born citizen of the United States.³¹ Oddjob wasn’t born in this country. Gort wasn’t assembled on this planet.

The Man Who Left With Head Between His Legs⁴⁰

Luckily, Trump may have found the ideal candidate to replace Vance: Dan Quayle. James Danforth Quayle was the vice president under George H. W. Bush from 1989 through 1993. He currently heads a division of Cerberus Capital Management, a global private equity firm.³²

“If we don’t succeed, we run the risk of failure.” Former Vice President Dan Quayle. Official portrait, Wikipedia.

Trump liked Quayle because he had much in common with his previous vice president, Mike Pence. Like Pence, Quayle was a mediocre Indiana politician: Mike was a governor; Dan was a senator. Like Pence, Quayle was elevated to VP just to gain the support of an important voting block: in Mike’s case, white evangelicals; in Dan’s, heartland voters who’d otherwise be put off by the New England-born patrician Bush. Like Pence, Quayle craved the attention and power of being in politics, and would humiliate himself to have it.

Quayle and Pence had one more thing in common: they weren’t the sharpest crayons in the box.

• Quayle has stressed “the importance of having the bondage between the parent and the child.”³³
• He believes “illegitimacy is something we should talk about in terms of not having it.”³⁴
• He wants children to be educated. ”What a waste it is to lose one’s mind,” Quayle said. “[And] not to have a mind is being very wasteful.”³⁵

Those are just some of the reasons why Indianans call Mike and Dan “the Wit brothers”: Pence is Half; Quayle is Dim.

Nonetheless, Trump is considering replacing Vance with Quayle. That’s because Dan is better than J. D. at explaining what’s at stake in this election.

• “The question is whether we’re going forward to tomorrow or whether we’re going to go past to the back!”³⁶
• “We don’t want to go back to tomorrow.”³⁷
• “No matter how rough the road may be, we can and we will, never, never surrender to what is right.”³⁸
• “You can believe me: I stand by all the misstatements that I’ve made.”³⁹

[1]: “Humiliating New Poll Shows J.D. Vance Is Historically Unpopular”, The New Republic, https://newrepublic.com/post/184930/jd-vance-new-poll-historically-unpopular

[2]: “What Is a Puppy Mill?”, Best Friends, https://bestfriends.org/advocacy/ending-puppy-mills/what-puppy-mill

[3]: “The movement desperately trying to get people to have more babies”, Vox, https://www.vox.com/policy/363543/pronatalism-vance-birth-rates-population-decline-fertility

[4]: “Charted: The Rapid Decline of Global Birth Rates”, Visual Capitalist, https://www.visualcapitalist.com/cp/charted-rapid-decline-of-global-birth-rates/

[5]: “Countries in the world by population (2024)”, Worldometer, https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/population-by-country/

[6]: “Working Family”, Work and Family Researchers Network, https://wfrn.org/glossary/working-family/

[7]: “Child-Care Availability and Fertility in Norway”, National Library of Medicine, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3099220/

[8]: “Vance advocates for expanding child tax credit ‘it should be bigger’”, The Gazette, https://gazette.com/news/wex/vance-advocates-for-expanding-child-tax-credit-it-should-be-bigger/article_8d99861f-9e04-588e-839b-52d6e1b458b0.html

[9]: “How Much Childcare Costs by State in the USA in 2024”, Illumine, https://illumine.app/blog/how-much-childcare-costs-by-state-in-usa/

[10]: “Senate Republicans block bill to expand child tax credit”, NBC News, https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/senate-democrats-will-force-vote-expand-child-tax-credit-gop-oppositio-rcna164499

[11]: “On Cat Ladies, Mama Bears and ‘Momala’”, The New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/19/opinion/kamala-harris-momala-vance.html

[12]: “Trump running mate JD Vance doubles down on ‘childless cat ladies’ comment about Harris, Democrats”, CNBC, https://www.cnbc.com/2024/07/26/trump-running-mate-jd-vance-defends-childless-cat-ladies.html

[13]: “Pet Ownership Statistics 2024”, Forbes Advisor, https://www.forbes.com/advisor/pet-insurance/pet-ownership-statistics/

[14]: “Number of households in the U.S. from 1960 to 2023”, Statista, https://www.statista.com/statistics/183635/number-of-households-in-the-us/

[15]: “Study describes pet cat personality”, American Veterinary Medical Association, https://www.avma.org/javma-news/2017-11-01/study-describes-pet-cat-personality

[16]: “JD Vance is now the least popular VP candidate in modern history — even below Sarah Palin”, The Independent, https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/americas/us-politics/jd-vance-poll-vp-popularity-sarah-palin-b2598125.html

[17]: McCain’s surprise VP: Alaska governor Palin, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, https://www.post-gazette.com/news/politics-nation/2008/08/30/McCain-s-surprise-VP-Alaska-governor-Palin/stories/200808300146

[18]: “The vice presidency, according to Sarah Palin”, St. Louis Public Radio, https://www.stlpr.org/government-politics-issues/2008-10-09/commentary-the-vice-presidency-according-to-sarah-palin

[19]: “‘Extremely stable genius’: Trump defends his mental fitness as he tears into Pelosi”, Politico, https://www.politico.com/story/2019/05/23/trump-stable-genius-1342655

[20]: “Top 10 Craziest Sarah Palin Quotes”, Liveabout, https://www.liveabout.com/top-dumbest-sarah-palin-quotes-2734671

[21]: “5 best Couric-Palin 2008 moments”, Politico, https://www.politico.com/story/2012/04/5-best-couric-palin-2008-moments-074735

[22]: “Paul Revere’s Ride, Reimagined by Sarah Palin”, Mother Jones, https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2011/06/paul-reveres-ride-reimagined-sarah-palin/

[23]: “Sarah Palin in her own words”, The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/oct/06/sarah-palin-her-own-words

[24]: “Sarah Palin and the Department of Law”, Gambit, https://www.nola.com/gambit/news/the_latest/sarah-palin-and-the-department-of-law/article_cb66fd30-6149-5193-a669-65fd69ba41c5.html

[25]: “Sarah Palin tells Bill O’Reilly she’s confident about Donald Trump in Michigan”, Salon, https://www.salon.com/2016/11/07/sarah-palin-tells-bill-oreilly-shes-confident-about-donald-trump-in-michigan-polls-are-only-good-for-strippers-and-cross-country-skiiers/

[26]: “‘Hardball with Chris Matthews’ for September 19, 2008”, NBC News, https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna26841599

[27]: “Donald Trump Mocks John McCain’s Service”, NBC News, https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2016-election/hes-not-war-hero-donald-trump-mocks-john-mccains-service-n394391

[28]: “Trump’s legal debts top a half-billion dollars. Will he have to pay?”, AP News, https://apnews.com/article/trump-fraud-carroll-fines-82d423b8e7a7f9a32470729c5f4410e5

[29]: “Six Takeaways From Trump’s New Financial Disclosure”, The New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/14/us/politics/trump-personal-financial-disclosure.html

[30]: Twelfth Amendment, Constitution of the United States, Constitution Annotated, https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/amendment-12/

[31]: Article II, Section 1, Clause 5, Constitution of the United States, Constitution Annotated, https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artII-S1-C5-1/ALDE_00013692/

[32]: “Dan Quayle, Chairman, Cerberus Global Investments, LLC”, Cerberus, https://www.cerberus.com/our-firm/leadership/dan-quayle/

[33]: Original sources were U.S. News and World Report, 10 October 1988, and the YouTube video “Who is Dan Quayle?”, Wide World of Quotes, https://www.wideworldofquotes.com/authors/q/dan-quayle.html

[34]: Dan Quayle quotation from Esquire magazine, The Quotations Page, http://www.quotationspage.com/quote/545.html

[35]: Original source was a speech to the United Negro College Fund on May 9, 1989, Wide World of Quotes, https://www.wideworldofquotes.com/authors/q/dan-quayle.html

[36]: Dan Quayle speech to California delegates to the Republican National Convention, August 17, 1988, Libquotes, https://libquotes.com/dan-quayle/quote/lbj6i5f

[37]: YouTube channel “xanopher”, “Dan Quayle Video Collage (Bloopers)”, posted October 8, 2006, AZ Quotes, https://www.azquotes.com/quote/678604

[38]: Dan Quayle November 15, 1991 speech to the Christian Coalition about abstinence to avoid AIDS, reported in August 1992 edition of Esquire magazine, Geocities, http://www.geocities.ws/hsingmin/humor/quaylisms.htm

[39]: Dan Quayle August 17, 1989 interview with Sam Donaldson, reported in August 1992 edition of Esquire magazine, Geocities, http://www.geocities.ws/hsingmin/humor/quaylisms.htm

[40]: Remark made following departure of White House Chief of Staff John Sununu, Earlham College, https://www.cs.earlham.edu/~skylar/humor/Unix/quaylequotes.html