JD Vance's Strange Resurfaced Car Seat Comment Will Have Trump Wishing He Could Pump The Brakes

Donald Trump picked a somewhat left-field vice presidential pick with JD Vance, but the Ohio senator doesn't seem to have been all that helpful to the campaign. His favorability ratings are low, and he's been lampooned in the media and online for things like his remarks about childless cat ladies — Taylor Swift even referenced Vance's comments in her official endorsement of Kamala Harris. Now, another one of Vance's talking points about kids has started making the rounds online, and it's receiving similar backlash. This time, it's from a March 2023 Senate hearing where he talks about America's declining birth rates and blames it on car seat regulations. It came up during a conversation about requiring kids under 2 years old to be in a safety seat on planes.

For some people, this seems to signal Vance's continued interest in how many children people are (or aren't) having. Others thought it was indicative of Vance's go-to political style. "Vance is one of the few humans who can twist life-saving car seats into a negative. This is a roadmap for how he presents almost every issue," one person wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter. Another wondered, "Why does he always focus on the weirdest things."

Commenters on the TikTok post showing JD Vance talking about car seats causing birth rates to go down weren't much nicer. "It sounds like he's saying we should lower the safety and quality standards of the car seats in order to get more families making more babies to put in those seats. This man is insane," one person said. Others poked holes in his argument, noting that childcare is far more expensive than the price of any car seat.

The argument seems to be that most cars have room for two car seats in the back, and for more car seats (and more young kids in a family), you would have to buy a bigger car, which can be cost-prohibitive. Vance might have based his remarks on a paper submitted to the Journal of Law and Economics in which the authors estimate that nearly 150,000 births didn't happen because of car seat regulations.

When Vance was asked about the high costs of childcare and what he and Donald Trump might do about it if they were to be elected, his suggestion that grandparents, aunts, and uncles be asked to help provide free childcare didn't really get a better response from critics. With such ongoing pushback against his VP pick, we can only wonder if Trump is regretting his choice; furthermore, Vance has seemingly dropped hints that Trump doesn't want to be seen with him.