Former President Donald Trump once said he would date his daughter, but that isn’t stopping conservatives from criticizing Democratic politicians for having what appear to be pretty normal, loving relationships with their families.
On Monday and Tuesday, conservatives took issue with a video clip from Monday’s Democratic National Convention of Vice President Kamala Harris’ husband Doug Emhoff and his daughter Ella. They also mocked Tim Walz’s son Gus for crying during his father’s speech on Wednesday. Gus Walz has a non-verbal learning disorder, ADHD, and an anxiety disorder, as the Walzs detailed to People.
“Talk about weird,” conservative commentator Ann Coulter wrote on X, formerly Twitter, about Gus Walz crying at the convention.
“Tim Walz stupid crying son isn’t the flex the left thinks it is,” wrote Trump delegate Mike Crispi. “You raised your kid to be a puffy beta male. Congrats. Does Barron Trump cry? Nope. Does he love his father? Of course. That’s the types of values I want leading the country.”
Crispi later deleted the post, saying he didn’t have context. However, his timeline still features a post criticizing Walz’s family for crying during their father’s speech.
Earlier in the week, conservatives teed off on Ella Emhoff having her arm around her father’s shoulders, with his arm around her waist.
“Totally not weird,” Charlie Kirk, founder and CEO of Turning Point USA, posted on X, formerly Twitter. Turning Point USA is a group that aims to promote conservative politics among students.
Democrats began calling Trump, his running mate J.D. Vance, and the Republican Party “weird” last month. It’s clearly gotten under the skin of conservative commentators like Kirk, who have been trying to turn the attack around on Democrats. The line has also been driving Trump crazy. Yesterday, the former president felt the need to spend time at an economic event trying to clarify that he and Vance are “extremely normal people.”
“This is Kamala’s family. Beyond parody,” wrote X account End Wokeness, which has nearly 3 million followers.
“Creepy,” posted Benny Johnson, a conservative political commentator and YouTuber.
Ella Emhoff, 25, is a model and artist. She got attention elsewhere for her camouflage hat, which says “Harris Walz” on it. The hat is similar to one that singer Chappell Roan is selling.
The Emhoffs weren’t the only ones to receive this kind of attention on Monday night and Tuesday morning. Johnson also posted a video from Monday of Joe Biden hugging his daughter Ashley. “What is going on here?!” Johnson wrote on X. “Joe Biden creepily hugs his daughter Ashley before taking the stage tonight,” he added on Instagram.
In her appearance at the DNC on Monday, Ashley called her father the “OG girl dad” and said, “He told me I could be anything and I could do anything.”
Perhaps this outrage at the videos from Monday is projection, as Trump sets a good example of what being creepy with your daughter actually looks like. Photos have circulated of Trump and his daughter being uncomfortably close, such as one photo in which a teenage Ivanka sits on his lap.
In 2004, Trump told radio host Howard Stern that it would be OK to call Ivanka a “piece of ass.”
“My daughter is beautiful, Ivanka,” Trump said.
“By the way, your daughter,” Stern said.
“She’s beautiful,” Trump responded.
“Can I say this? A piece of ass,” Stern said.
“Yeah,” Trump said.
Now, that’s creepy.
War Is Peace: Trump’s Regime-Change Reversal
As American and Israeli rockets fly into Tehran, with the stated goal of regime change, anyone who bought into the self-evidently absurd idea of “Donald the Dove” ending America’s forever wars ought to be suffering from a bloody form of buyer’s remorse.
It was always bullshit. But that’s what the Trump team was selling hard. Take human ghoul Stephen Miller’s tweet days before the election: “Kamala = WWIII. Trump = Peace.”
The Trump team reads George Orwell’s 1984 like an owner’s manual and so of course “war is peace.” Their undermining of NATO and the dismantling of American alliances in favor of a “might makes right” foreign policy executed by a sycophantic kakistocracy is a guarantee of more war amid autocratic power grabs worldwide, with a side order of corrupt crony capitalism to profit from the chaos.
If you voted for Trump and believed him, this is on you. And that includes self-styled Palestinian peace activists who thought that Biden and Harris were the worst of all possible worlds and stayed home. We will no doubt see protests for the innocent lives lost in these strikes — but I’d have a lot more time for those folks if they were also seen protesting the estimated 20,000 to 30,000 Iranian lives snuffed out by murderous mullahs in the last few months alone.
The Islamic Republic of Iran has been despotic and dangerous from its inception. The Iranian people have been oppressed and denied basic freedoms for decades. But this is an extreme example of a war of choice. The American military strikes against Iran’s nuclear weapons facility last year were justified because Iran cannot be trusted with a nuclear weapon. That is true. But the much trumpeted total obliteration of those facilities is apparently not true — or so goes the justification for this war. And don’t forget that it was Trump who pulled the U.S. out of an Obama-era deal to stop Iran from developing weapons — arguing absurdly that the imperfect anti-nuke deal needed to be blown up to stop Iran from developing a bomb. Iran’s subsequent progress toward a bomb then created the rationale toward these strikes. This is a self-inflicted state of emergency. Peace is war and war is peace.
Pity the willful dupes in Congress who deluded themselves into thinking that Trump deserved the Nobel Peace Prize. They’ll probably rationalize that he would’ve been peaceful if he got the honor. Now it will be read as a cautionary tale for not sucking up. The chairman of the Board of Peace is now bored of peace. While Rand Paul remains admirably consistent, it’s Lindsey Graham who is pirouetting around the Senate floor while the Gimp Speaker Mike Johnson is unable to speak for the basic constitutional principles of separation of powers let alone authorization to go to war.
If you’re feeling shell-shocked trying to keep up with Operation Epstein Distraction, get ready for the inevitable next crisis — regime change without a plan for replacement. This is what the Trump administration did in Venezuela — kidnapping the socialist dictator Maduro but keeping his regime in place in exchange for crude oil access. The opposition is still in exile and its leader María Corina Machado gave her Nobel Peace Prize to Trump in exchange for exactly nothing.
One of the clear lessons of history is that if you don’t win the peace, you don’t win the war. The Saudis and their Sunni allies will back the U.S. and Iran because they hate the Shia Iranians (who, incidentally, are not Arabs), but beyond removing the Iranian regime, the plans for replacement and stabilization seem TBD — and with Trump’s inability to stay focused on anything beyond his immediate self-interest, solid plans are unlikely to emerge. Maybe a leader will come from the underground opposition; maybe it will be the Shah’s son, who has been living in the U.S. waiting for a restoration like many members of the diaspora. The upside is that Iran has a distinguished history and an accomplished Persian culture: The Islamists don’t represent the entirety of the people of Iran and never have.
But the path ahead will be messy at best. It will require concerted effort and civil commitment, not just an open call for private investment from Mar-a-Lago members. If the United States is now kidnapping and killing dictators without direct provocation, it establishes a dangerous precedent which will come back to bite us after demolishing our moral authority in the world.
It is the unexpected effects, the cascades of consequence where we cannot always plan ahead, that cause most responsible statesmen to try to keep the peace. But Trump has the carelessness of a rich-boy bully who can always buy or bluster his way out of trouble. He’s a con man who has found his ultimate mark in his followers, who fool themselves into thinking that a reflexive liar is the one man with the courage to tell the truth.
Perhaps the most prominent example is the vice president himself — a bright guy who not that long ago compared Trump to Hitler and a deadly narcotic but then convinced himself that careerism demanded an abrupt conversion. After all, he endorsed Trump less than two years ago with this very serious column headlined “Trump’s Best Foreign Policy? Not Starting Any Wars,” explaining, “He has my support in 2024 because I know he won’t recklessly send Americans to fight overseas.”