In a contentious sitdown on Sunday, Ohio Sen. JD Vance falsely claimed that Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, Vice President Kamala Harris’ running mate, supports the government taking children away from their parents if the parents don’t consent to gender transition treatments, describing the Democrat as supporting “kidnapping.”
The baseless accusation comes days after former President Donald Trump made a similar remark at a Montana rally, claiming Walz “signed a law letting the state kidnap children to change their gender."
Vance’s comments came in an interview with ABC News’ “This Week,” and received pushback from host Jon Karl who called the assertion “not remotely true” and “crazy.”
“What President Trump said, Jon, is that Tim Walz has supported taking children from their parents if the parents don't consent to gender reassignment, that is crazy,” Vance said. “Tim Walz gets on his high horse about ‘mind your own damn business.’ One way of minding your own damn business, Jon, is to not try to take my children away from me.”
“What I just explained to you I would describe as kidnapping,” Walz said.
Walz has never signed any legislation, nor expressed support for legislation, that would allow the state to remove children from their parent’s custody if they didn’t consent to gender transition treatment. Walz has come under attack from Republicans for an April 2023 law he signed that protects transgender patients, parents and healthcare providers from out-of-state laws that would punish them for receiving care. Among other provisions, the law gives “temporary emergency jurisdiction” to state courts to arbitrate custody disputes that cross state lines and involve a debate between parents over the care in question. It does not give the state the authority to remove children from their parents’ custody for declining to pursue gender transition care, a Minnesota LGBTQ advocacy organization director told the Washington Post.
Vance’s appearance on ABC News was one of three Sunday morning news show stops he made this weekend as he was tasked with defending his record and attacking Harris and Walz. On CNN’s “State of the Union,” Vance deflected criticisms of his past remarks and the Democratic labeling of Republican leaders as “weird” by accusing Harris of being “anti-family” and describing Walz’s relationship with his wife as “weird.”
Vance continued to attempt to clean up his repeated description of the Democratic Party as being run by “childless cat ladies,” including Harris and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigeig. Harris is the stepmother to two children and Buttigeig is raising adopted twins with his husband.
“I'm pro-family. I want us to have more families. And obviously, sometimes it doesn't work out, sometimes for medical reasons, sometimes because you don't meet the right person. But the point is that our country has become anti-family in its public policy,” Vance said. “I criticize Kamala Harris for being part of a set of ideas that exist in American leadership that is anti-family.”
As examples of “anti-family” policies, Vance cited the closures of schools during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic and policies that required children to wear masks, as well as falsely claiming Harris “has said things like it's reasonable not to have children over climate change.” Harris never said that.
Last September, speaking at a community college in Pennsylvania, Harris said young leaders in climate change activism had discussed their concerns with her about “whether it makes sense for you to even think about having children, whether it makes sense for you to think about aspiring to buy a home because what will this climate be?” She did not endorse the notion of not having children because of climate change and instead spoke about the Biden administration’s climate policies in an effort to soothe those anxieties about the future.
In the same CNN interview on Sunday, Vance also pushed back on Democrats’ description of Republican leaders and their policy proposals as “weird,” a line of attack popularized by Walz in recent weeks. Vance turned the attack back on Walz, criticizing him for briefly shaking his wife’s hand before hugging her at the Philadelphia rally last week where he officially joined Harris’ ticket. The Trump campaign highlighted the moment at the time, calling Walz a “freak.”
“I think that it is a little bit of projection… just think a couple of days ago, Tim Walz gives this big speech. He's been announced as the VP nominee. And I remember when I had just been announced as the VP nominee, I gave my big speech and I saw my wife, and I gave her a big hug and a kiss, because I love my wife, and I think that's what a normal person does,” Vance said. “Tim Walz gave his wife a nice, firm, Midwestern handshake, and then tried to sort of awkwardly correct for it.”
“He acted weird, which he did on a national stage in front of his wife, and in front of millions of Americans who presumably were watching at home. And I think that his projection,” Vance added.
Buttigieg appeared on CNN immediately following the airing of the Vance interview on Sunday morning and said Vance’s comments were part of a “politics of disparagement and destruction and insult” that featured prominently in Trump’s first term.
“He seems incapable of talking about a vision for this country in terms of lifting people up or building people up or helping people out. It's always disparagement,” Buttigieg said. “If you disagree with him, if you disagree with JD Vance, Donald Trump and Republicans’ agenda to dismantle the Department of Education or any of the other things they're proposing to do, you're not just disagreeing, you’re anti-child. This is exactly the kind of politics that people are sick of.”
Walz had a response of his own, saying in a 17 second clip shared by the Harris campaign that “we have a rule, whether you’d make the same decision as someone else: Just mind your own damn business.”
He also criticized Vance for being unable to articulate the Republican ticket’s position on the medical abortion drug mifepristone and the upcoming Florida ballot referendum that would codify abortion access through 24 weeks of pregnancy in the state constitution. Trump seemed to indicate at a press conference last week he was open to restricting mifepristone on the federal level, though his campaign and Vance later said he struggled to hear the question. Vance said on CBS News’ “Face the Nation” on Sunday the decision would be up to the states, that there would be no litmus test for Food and Drug Administration commissioners regarding the drug, said he wanted the FDA to review the drug’s safety and falsely claimed Democrats support abortion “sometimes even beyond the moment of birth, which is just sick stuff.”
“After birth abortions” would be considered murder in every jurisdiction in the United States and does not exist, according to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. Less than 1% of abortions in the U.S. prior to the end of Roe v. Wade in 2022 were conducted after 21 weeks of pregnancy, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Vance has been deployed heavily by the Trump campaign as the former president has taken a lighter load of campaigning in recent weeks, appearing at only one rally last week as Harris and Walz dotted the country’s swing states for appearances in front of large crowds. Vance followed his Democratic rivals from Philadelphia last Tuesday to Michigan and Wisconsin on Wednesday with a planned trip to North Carolina that both campaigns canceled due to Tropical Storm Debby. Along the way, Vance has criticized Harris and Walz for not speaking to the media and taking questions, contrasting their tactics with his and Trump’s approach to the campaign.
While he conducted interviews and held an hour-long press conference at his Florida estate last week, Trump only hit the trail on Thursday in Montana — a red state with a competitive Senate race, but one that is not expected to be competitive on the presidential level. On Sunday, as Vance participated in three major, at times heated interviews, Trump spent the morning on social media handing out endorsements to Republicans across the country, congratulating New Zealand golfer Lydia Ko for winning the Olympic gold medal, calling for those imprisoned for crimes connected to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol to be freed — “RELEASE THE J6 HOSTAGES, NOW!!!” he wrote — and falsely claiming that the thousands of people who greeted Harris and Walz at their Michigan rally “didn’t exist” and images of the crowds were AI-generated.