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.
Donald Trump speaks in front of the American flag at the White House, on May 12, 2026.
It’s the Corruption, Stupid
Let’s say it plainly: There has never been a president as corrupt as Donald Trump. There is no close second in our history.
Take two days in May as Exhibit A. Americans just found out that in the first quarter of this year, Trump’s stock portfolio made 3,600 trades — an average of nearly 60 a day. This is a rapacious pace that would make a day trader on meth blush. Many of these appear suspiciously timed to benefit from actions approved by the president himself. For example, his Nvidia stock surged after Trump announced the company would be permitted to sell its cutting-edge AI chips to China. Similar suspiciously well-timed calls were made ahead of big government moves involving other companies, from Intel to Palantir to Boeing. The Trump Organization says all trades are made by a third-party investment advisor. If so, they appear to be psychic.
But the apparent insider trading scam being run from within the Oval Office is small change — merely millions of dollars — compared to the self-dealing plunder of $1.8 billion tax-payer dollars being pushed through the DOJ and IRS.
There’s never been a sitting president who sued his own government for $10 billion. That’s because it’s absurdly corrupt. But that’s what Donald Trump did, arguing he had suffered damages from prosecutions pursued before he was reelected. Trump, like many of his supporters, persistently confuses persecution with prosecution.
The judge who heard the case convened an independent panel to review the suit, suspecting it might be a scam. Before the case could be dismissed, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche — who had previously served as Trump’s personal lawyer — declared that the bogus suit would be preemptively settled, not for $10 billion, but for the symbolic sum of $1.776 billion, which Trump said will be distributed to persecuted political allies.
This is a shakedown. The president is compelling a Justice Department he controls to redirect money from taxpayers — that’s you — to his most fervent supporters. This slush fund will set off a cash grab among MAGA lawyers and be used to reward partisan fanatics who attacked the U.S. Capitol — and police officers — on his behalf.
If that wasn’t enough of a blatantly illegal use of presidential power, it was revealed that the “settlement” deal included a pledge signed by the acting attorney general that would ensure — in the hysterical all caps of a Trump tweet — that the government would be “FOREVER BARRED and PRECLUDED from prosecuting or pursuing” any tax claims, audits or related prosecutions against Trump, his family or their businesses. This is an attempt to get a permanent get-out-of-jail-free card for the Trump family — a license to steal.
All of this is insane. All of it is unethical, and much of it is illegal and impeachable — but our system was not designed to deal with a shamelessly self-dealing president, a spineless Republican Congress, and a complaint conservative Supreme Court that has refused to enforce the emoluments clause of the Constitution and ruled that Trump has immunity for actions he takes as president. That ruling may prove to be the most consequential — and most corrosive — act of judicial abdication in American history. Against this partisan-group think, individual acts of courage matter. So kudos to the top lawyer at the Treasury Department, Brian Morrissey, who at least had the integrity to resign rather than oversee this tax-payer funded plunder.
Just to close out the corruption-palooza, Trump announced that he would endorse the Lone Star State poster-boy of corruption, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, in his primary against incumbent GOP Senator John Cornyn. Paxton’s scandals include a truly buffoonish array of fraud and bribery charges that resulted in him nearly being impeached by the state legislature. But corruption is a feature, not a bug, of Trumpland.All this smacks of late Rome and you’d be forgiven for half expecting Trump will next appoint a horse to an open Cabinet position, with Republicans rationalizing the need for more equine representation. It is no more absurd that the cavalcade of Trump appointees refusing to say that Biden won the 2020 election during their confirmation hearings in the Senate. The decision to parrot unreality for partisan gain defines deviancy down.
But in the search for something hopeful to hold onto in dark times, you can find some comfort in the fact that corruption is often the thing that turns the tide against authoritarian-adjacent administrations. And there is evidence this is happening.
Trump’s billions in self-enrichment, his reflexive twisting of U.S. policy to sell out long-term national interests and enduring values, comes at a moment when nearly half of Americans say they are feeling extremely anxious about their own financial situation.
That anxiety is driven by the widening gap between Main Street and Wall Street, a gap set on fire by a trade war and a real war Trump started, which has no end in sight but promises to further raise energy prices, fertilizer prices, and strangle the global economy. While CEOs embrace the transactional nature of this president, kissing his ring and offering vigs, the situation is grim if you’re not lining up at the Trump trough. At a time when the super-rich are getting richer, everyone else is told to go to hell by the man in the White House.
These are precisely the kinds of conditions that turn people against an aging, autocratic president who shows contempt for the very people who put him in office. It is not just that Trump’s approval numbers have plummeted to the point where two-thirds of Americans disapprove of the job he is doing. It is that Trump, for the first time, is opposed by a majority of non-college-educated white voters — a.k.a. his base — and they feel betrayed because Trump is raking in billions of dollars while they struggle to pay rent and buy groceries. Trump has dismissed and discounted their concerns, turning a blind eye to the anger about rising costs that carried him back into the presidency.
Trump’s aim is to make his thievery so blatant that we collectively become numb to it and disfigure our democracy in the process. Once upon a time conservatives warned about the dangers of “crony capitalism” and corruption. Now they are silent and complicit. It is the temporary triumph of partisanship over principle. Patriotism demands that we reassert the basic American idea that no man is above the law and that our presidents are not kings.