Donald Trump attempted to do damage control over JD Vance’s “childless cat ladies” remark on Monday, saying that—far from taking offense to his running mate’s claim that women who don’t have children are miserable human beings who want everyone else to be miserable too—those women “understand” what Vance was getting at and appreciate the sentiment.

Speaking to Fox News host Laura Ingraham, Trump explained that Vance “feels family is good,” that there isn’t “anything wrong in saying that,” and that women who haven’t had children “understand” that.

As he is contractually obligated to do, Trump then claimed Democrats have twisted Vance’s original comments, saying, “The Democrats are good at spinning things differently from what they are.” Of course, that is not actually true at all. To be clear, in 2021 the then Senate candidate told Tucker Carlson verbatim, “We’re effectively run in this country…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. And it’s just a basic fact: You look at Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, AOC—the entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children. And how does it make any sense that we’ve turned our country over to people who don’t really have a direct stake in it?”

Meanwhile, the idea that the people Vance insulted get what he was saying and maybe even agree with it is pretty laughable, as his remarks have provoked major outrage that has dominated the news cycle for more than a week, with at least one major Hollywood star taking him to task. And it’s not just “childless cat ladies” whom Vance has pissed off. On Monday, Buttigieg ripped the Ohio senator’s claim that, as quoted by Buttigieg, “people who don’t have children have no physical commitment to the future of this country,” with the transportation secretary telling Jon Stewart: “When I was deployed to Afghanistan, I didn’t have kids back then, but I will tell you…my commitment to this country felt pretty physical.”

While Vance has attempted to explain away his absurd remarks about women who don’t have children, his obsession with demonizing anyone without kids goes beyond the “childless cat ladies” comment. As KFile reported on Tuesday:

Republican vice presidential nominee Senator JD Vance has a history of making disparaging remarks toward people without children, a CNN KFile review of his comments shows, including fundraising off his now infamous “childless cat lady” remarks in a series of emails that called Democratic leaders “childless sociopaths” who “don’t have a direct stake in this country.”

In November 2020, Vance said on a conservative podcast that childless Americans, especially those in the country’s “leadership class,” were “more sociopathic” than those with children and made the country “less mentally stable.” Vance added that the “most deranged” and “most psychotic” commentators on Twitter—now known as X—were typically childless.

Here’s that clip of Vance claiming not having children makes people mentally unstable sociopaths:

As a reminder, this is a man who wrote in his memoir that his grandmother once poured gasoline “all over her husband, lit a match, and dropped it on his chest,” leading him to “burst into flames.” But it's childless people who need their heads examined.