Opinion | JD Vance, Purr-fectly Dreadful

Suddenly, Donald Trump looks enlightened about women.

Sure, he’s in a 1959 time warp, like some spray-tanned, comb-over swinger in a Vegas lounge, talking about skirts and broads.

Sure, he filled the Supreme Court with religious zealots ending women’s rights.

Sure, he has been held liable for sexual abuse, accused of groping and caught talking about his right to grab women by their lady parts. He cheated on his first wife with the woman who became his second wife and then had flings when he was married to his third wife. He betrayed Melania with a porn star while she was home nursing their son and humiliated her again when the Stormy Daniels case went to trial. (See: Why Melania did not give a convention speech.)

Sure, his convention beatification was a dated homage to machismo, with Hulk Hogan tearing his shirt off and the U.F.C.’s Dana White introducing Trump as a fighter.

And yet, somehow, Trump managed to choose a vice-presidential pick whose views on women are even more draconian and meanspirited than his own.

JD Vance, he of many names, is off to a thudding start. He went on Megyn Kelly’s podcast Friday for cleanup on Aisle Feline. She sympathetically asked him about his 2021 rant to Tucker Carlson that top Democrats — Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg and A.O.C. — were “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices they’ve made, and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.”

Vance explained to Kelly: “Obviously, it was a sarcastic comment. I’ve got nothing against cats.”

Ha. Ha. Ha. He’s the Republican Party’s biggest wit since that laugh riot Sarah Palin.