Democrats have been pushing their narrative for weeks that JD Vance is “weird” around women.
Now DailyMail.com has uncovered a decades-old image that will do little to help the Republican vice-presidential candidate dispel that characterisation.
It was taken in jest – and there is some real meaning behind it – but it still doesn’t make for a good impression considering the other claims made about Donald Trump’s choice for his number two.
In the photo, Vance, then 18, is seen in a men’s bathroom watching three girls pretend to use the urinals.
The photograph appeared in the 2003 yearbook of Middletown High School in Ohio, when Vance (then known as JD Hamel) was a senior.
DailyMail.com has unearthed a decades-old photograph of JD Vance posing with three female classmates at the urinals in a boys’ bathroom during his senior year of high school in Ohio.
The image appeared in the 2003 yearbook of Middletown High School in Ohio when Vance, then known as JD Hamel, was an 18-year-old high school senior.
The yearbook itself gave no explanation as to why the three girls were in the bathroom or why they should be photographed with Vance.
But now, one of the three has explained to DailyMail.com the meaning behind the shocking shot.
It was to show the power of girls in student government that year, said one of the women who asked that her name not be used.
“We thought it would be fun,” he added.
‘Typically, we were all male officers and we were evenly split, so it was a bit of a reverse.’
The image showed the four main officers of the student council: president, vice president, secretary and treasurer.
Ironically, Vance was vice president, the position he now aspires to occupy in the federal government.
Vance’s team did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
But while the image was intended as a cheerful take on school life, it can’t help but add to the perception that Vance, now 40, will have to let go of.
The first-term US senator from Ohio has been under constant criticism since Donald Trump chose him as his running mate on July 15.
Democrats have gleefully seized on old comments of his that reinforce the idea that he doesn’t know how to treat women.
One of the most notable was when he said the country “is effectively run by a bunch of cat-loving women with no children,” pointing to Kamala Harris, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Pete Buttigieg, who are “miserable about their own lives and the choices they’ve made, and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.”
“The entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children,” he said, failing to note that Harris and Buttigieg have adopted children and that AOC, at 34, is still of childbearing age.
Eight-time Oscar-nominated actress Glenn Close, who played Vance’s grandmother in the film version of his memoir Hillbilly Elegy, posted a photo on Instagram of herself holding her cat Eve.
“Eva would have left a bleeding mouse head on the bed of anyone who criticised any kind of lady with a cat!” the mother-of-one wrote.
Critics have also noted that Vance has supported state oversight of women’s pregnancies.
“She has constantly shamed families and mothers who prioritize their careers and decide to wait to start a family,” one said.
“Vance has made nasty comments about his ‘effect on women,’ and has a history of judging and making insulting assumptions about the women in his life,” the source added.
Democrats recall the time when she was 14 years old when they asked her to pick a political issue that interested her, and she chose abortion.
Glenn Close, who played Vance’s grandmother in the film version of his memoir Hillbilly Elegy, responded to his comments in an Instagram photo of her holding her cat Eve.
Vance’s Democratic opponent, Tim Walz, was the first to call Vance and Trump “weird” and “creepy.” The vice presidential candidate appears with candidate Kamala Harris at her rally in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, last week.
This image, said to be of JD Vance wearing a blonde wig and what appears to be a long skirt, has gone viral online.
He still considers himself “100 percent pro-life” and has called for a federal limit on abortion, saying of cases where women want to end their pregnancies in cases of rape or incest that “two wrongs don’t make a right.”
It was his vice presidential opponent, Democratic Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, who first coined the word “weird” to refer to Trump and Vance.
He called the pair “creepy” and “weird as hell.”
In a previous interview he said: “These guys are just weird. They’re running for some club of strong men who hate women or something. That’s what they do. That’s not what people are interested in.”
The comments have since sparked a fierce campaign by critics and internet sleuths ridiculing and digging up dirt on Vance, including a viral photo purportedly of Vance dressed as a woman and sporting a blonde wig.
That photograph is said to date from his time at Yale Law School.
Vance responded to the criticism, telling CNN’s Dana Bash that the name-calling is “fundamentally bullying stuff.”
“They’re calling names instead of actually telling the American people how they’re going to make their lives better,” he said.
-I think that’s weird, Dana, but look, they can call me whatever they want.
He then said Democrats’ use of the term “weird” had less to do with him and Trump, and more to do with the fact that his opponents “are not comfortable in their own skin, because they are uncomfortable with their policy positions for the American people.”
But Democrats say there are so many examples of Vance feeling uncomfortable talking about women’s issues that the accusation of queerness is accurate.
Democrats have cited Vance’s tendency to criticize women for working instead of raising a family as an example of his disconnect with women’s issues.
JD and Usha Vance with two of their three sons, Ewan and Vivek
They cite as an example his tendency to criticize women for working instead of raising a family.
“If your worldview tells you that it’s bad for women to be mothers, but it’s liberating for them to work 90 hours a week in a cubicle at the New York Times or Goldman Sachs, you’ve been fooled,” she said in 2022.
And Harris’s team has even claimed that he was advocating that women should stay in unhappy, or even violent, marriages for the sake of their children, when he said in 2022 that the sexual revolution had made it easier for people to “change spouses like you change underwear.”
Vance has flatly denied that was what he meant.
A column in his home state Ohio Capital Magazine She added that Vance’s “stalking” of Vice President Kamala Harris at Eau Clair Airport in Wisconsin, when he approached her plane in an attempt to get her to answer questions, was another example of his “disdain” for women.
“It was the kind of childish behavior you’d expect from a frat boy acting like a jerk,” wrote Marilou Johanek, who labeled Vance “the cringeworthy senator.”
“The Republican vice presidential nominee appears intent on reinforcing his odious public image as a bizarre piece from The Handmaid’s Tale,” he added.
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