Donald Trump has chosen J.D. Vance as his running mate. At a moment when Republicans say they're seeking "national unity," I want to remind you that J.D. Vance hates many, many people and is proud to say so. Vance is not like Donald Trump, whose expressions of hatred are sometimes just theater. It's clear that Vance is an angry, nasty person whose contempt for the people he doesn't like is bone deep.

Remember his 2022 Senate campaign, when he called Vice President Harris and others "childless cat ladies"?

Vance ... for a solid week in July kept using the term “childless” in an effort to insult his foes on the left.

“We’re effectively run in this country, via the Democrats, via our corporate oligarchs, by 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,” Vance told Tucker Carlson at the time.

As examples of childless cat ladies, Vance pointed to Vice President Kamala Harris (who has stepchildren); progressive Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), the youngest woman in Congress; and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, who announced a month later he and his husband had adopted infant twins.

The reference to Buttigieg is a cat lady is also homophobic, though Vance has also used the term to refer to heterosexually married economist and commentator Paul Krugman:

Of course, Vance thinks all Democrats are "scumbags," as he told us when he accepted Marjorie Taylor Greene's endorsement in his Senate race:

In a 2021 speech to the Claremont Institute’s Center for the American Way of Life, Vance implied that he wants to have a shooting war with liberals:

It may not be as bad as it was in the 1860s, but we’re all going through a fiery trial. The people in this room are the people who are going to be at the vanguard of the conservative movement that actually fights back against our enemies instead of just taking it. Because if our enemies are using guns and bazookas, we damn well better fight back with more than wet noodles. We need to use the same means if we’re actually going to win this fight. And I’m not in this to lose, I’m in this to win.

Am I misreading what Vance said? All I can tell you is that if President Biden's post-debate statement that "It’s time to put Trump in a bullseye" is being taken as a literal call for violence, then this Vance speech should be read the same way.

Vance also thought the tragic shooting on the set of the film Rust was hilarious. The day after the shooting, at a time when Jack Dorsey was still the CEO of Twitter, Vance thought it would be delightful for Trump to be back on the site so he could make tasteless jokes about the death, because Vance is a Republican, and Republicans hate Alec Baldwin, who's a Democrat:

And let's not forget Vance's assertion in 2021 that even domestic abuse victims shouldn't be able to get no-fault divorces:

The Ohio Republican Senate nominee, talking to Pacifica Christian High School in Southern California ... gave an extended answer that claimed that people now “shift spouses like they change their underwear,” and that it had done long-term damage to a generation of children.

“This is one of the great tricks that I think the sexual revolution pulled on the American populace, which is the idea that like, ‘well, OK, these marriages were fundamentally, you know, they were maybe even violent, but certainly they were unhappy. And so getting rid of them and making it easier for people to shift spouses like they change their underwear, that’s going to make people happier in the long term,’” Vance said.

“And maybe it worked out for the moms and dads, though I’m skeptical. But it really didn’t work out for the kids of those marriages,” Vance continued. “And that’s what I think all of us should be honest about, is we’ve run this experiment in real time. And what we have is a lot of very, very real family dysfunction that’s making our kids unhappy.”

Yes, Vance believes it's not good for the children of abused spouses if the abuse victims exit the marriages.

Now that Trump has chosen Vance, I expect Democrats to focus on the mean tweets Vance posted about Trump before he became a Trump fan. I don't see the point -- politcians (and non-politicians) change their minds about people all the time. Kamala Harris said harsh things about Joe Biden during the 2020 campaign. George H.W. Bush attacked Ronald Reagan's economic ideas in the 1980 campaign. I think it's more important for voters to know how much contempt Vance has for everyone who disagrees with him or does things he doesn't like. I have kids, so he hates me. Maybe he hates you too.

Published with permission of No More Mister Nice Blog