Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has defended Senator JD Vance’s past comments about “childless cat ladies”, saying that Vance was simply trying to show how much he values family life.
Vance’s 2021 comments criticising vice-president Kamala Harris and other Democrats as “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives” resurfaced after Trump selected the Ohio senator as his running mate earlier this month.
The comments prompted a backlash and warnings from some political strategists that they could cost the Trump campaign valuable votes in a close election.
“He grew up in a very interesting family situation, and he feels family is good. And I don’t think there’s anything wrong in saying that,” Trump said in an interview on Fox News that aired on Monday.
Trump also said in the interview that he did not place a higher value on people with families.
“You know, you don’t meet the right person, or you don’t meet any person. But you’re just as good, in many cases, a lot better than a person that’s in a family situation,” Trump said.
Harris has two stepchildren with her husband, lawyer Doug Emhoff and Vance, who was brought up in Ohio, was largely raised by his grandmother.
Donald Trump also spoke in the interview about the assassination attempt against him at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania earlier this month, as the FBI continues to investigate what motivated the shooter, 20-year-old Thomas Crooks.
Trump said he would sit for an interview with the FBI this week.
On Monday and FBI officials said that police had noticed the man who tried to assassinate Trump more than an hour before the 13 July shooting in Butler, Pennsylvania, and took a photo to share with other law enforcement officers.
“The shooter was identified by law enforcement as a suspicious person,” Kevin Rojek, the special agent in charge of the FBI’s Pittsburgh field office, told reporters at a briefing on the agency’s investigation into the assassination attempt.
He said a local officer took a photo of Crooks and sent it to other law enforcement officials at the scene of Trump’s rally that day. Thirty minutes later, Rojek said, Swat team operators saw Crooks using a rangefinder and browsing news sites.
Crooks was seen carrying a backpack about 5.56pm, less than 20 minutes before the shooting took place, and at 6.08pm he was caught on a police dashboard camera walking on the roof from where he ultimately fired the shots, Rojek said.
Although the FBI is not the agency responsible for investigating any lapses in Trump’s security, FBI personnel are putting together a timeline of events, he said.
FBI officials said they had yet to identify a motive for Crooks, who was shot dead by a Secret Service agent after opening fire.
But they said he had conducted online searches on prior mass shooting events, on improvised explosive devices and on the attempted assassination of the Slovakian prime minister in May.
Trump, who has been highly critical of the FBI, agreed to sit for a standard victim’s interview, which “will be consistent with any victim interview we do”, Rojek said. “We want to get his perspective.”
Rojek confirmed Trump was struck by a bullet, whether “whole or fragmented into smaller pieces”.
FBI officials have described Crooks as a loner who had no close friends or acquaintances, with his social circle limited primarily to immediate family members.
During Monday’s Fox News interview, Trump said he would continue to hold outdoor rallies despite the shooting and insistence from the Secret Service.
Trump also did little to clear up questions over whether he will participate in a 10 September debate with Kamala Harris. The event had been previously scheduled against Biden.
“I’ll probably end up debating,” Trump said. “But I can also make a case for not doing it.”