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.
The first day of the 2026 Republican National Convention at the American Airlines Center, on Sept. 9, 2026 in Dallas, Texas.
People of all colors listen as Donald Trump speaks on the first day of the Republican midterm convention.
Trump supporters at the Republican midterm convention.
A Canadian flag flies along the waterfront of Lake Ontario, on Aug. 27, 2026. Cole Burston/AFP/Getty Images
It’s Been 25 Years Since 9/11. Did the Terrorists Win?
I once had a conversation with Barack Obama about the nature of terrorism. This was during his second term, and he’d been going on for a few minutes about how Islamic terrorism wasn’t actually an existential threat to Americans, but rather a chronic and manageable risk. I was all too familiar with this argument, having conducted the interview with John Kerry in 2004, in which he said terrorism could be reduced to the level of a “nuisance” — a quote that blew up on him during the final weeks of the campaign. I found Kerry’s answer problematic then, and I had the same reaction when Obama said it. I asked him pointedly: What would have to happen for him to decide that terrorism was, in fact, existential? How about a suitcase nuke on a subway car? Then would he concede that terrorists were more than criminal gangs?
Obama didn’t hesitate. Terrorism would only reach the level of an existential threat, he told me, if Americans responded by abandoning their own values and turning on one another. There was nothing a bunch of homicidal zealots could do to destroy the most powerful country on Earth, but we could certainly destroy ourselves if we abandoned our constitutional protections in a fit of panic.
At the time, this struck me as something you might expect to hear from a constitutional-law professor, but not necessarily from the president of the United States. There was an intellectual fatalism about Obama I sometimes found disconcerting — a sense that he saw himself as a twig in the river of history, and it was up to the rest of us to change the current. I doubt he would dispute that assessment. But I thought often of that conversation a few years later, as the country careened into the Trump era. And as we pause now to reflect on the 25 years that have passed since the attacks of Sept. 11, I find myself thinking about it again.
Alternative histories are a tricky business, best left to novelists and sci-fi filmmakers. As a friend of mine in politics likes to say, mockingly, whenever such theories get floated: What if Hitler had won the Civil War? And yet, it’s hard not to see a direct line between the events of 2001 and where we are today — and to wonder how different the country might have looked had it never happened. On the eve of the devastating attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, George W. Bush’s young presidency seemed to be wobbling. Absent those attacks, he might well have been a one-term president, and he almost certainly would not have invaded Iraq. Nor would Democrats become backed into defending the entrenched war in Afghanistan as the “good war” — a way of differentiating their own response to 9/11 from Bush’s without sounding reflexively pacifist.
Without the economic shock of 2001, it’s unlikely that desperate policymakers would have looked the other way while lenders, underwritten by the government, turned the housing market into a casino, leading to the second massive blow of the decade: the market collapse of 2008. All of these things, in quick succession, destroyed what remained of the public’s faith in its governing establishment, leading directly to Obama’s stunning takeover of the Democratic Party and, later, to the election of Donald Trump.
The Trump I met in the late 1990s, while he was flirting with an independent run for president, held himself out as a centrist reformer, in the mold of Ross Perot. By 2015, when he started running as a Republican, Trump had fully embraced a reactionary, white-nationalist movement — a response to Obama, yes, but also to Bush, whose instinct in the months after 9/11 had been to speak out forcefully in defense of Muslim Americans, and whose support for liberalized immigration infuriated much of his party’s base. Trump’s core appeal then, as it is now, was rooted firmly in the nativist, anti-globalist backlash that emerged in 2001. (According to Pew Research, roughly 42 percent of Americans believe Muslims are having a negative impact on the country.) The animating idea of Trump’s second term is that white, English-speaking Americans are the only authentic Americans. It shouldn’t be controversial to say that he will twist or shred any page of the Constitution to enact this vision, since he really makes no effort to conceal it.
Nor is America’s hard turn away from pluralism and liberal democracy happening in a vacuum — far from it. In the past decade, similarly reactionary, anti-immigrant movements have rocked Britain and taken over Italy, and they now seem poised to wrest power in France and Germany. Maybe some of this would have happened without 9/11; the hollowing-out forces of globalization and automation were already fueling plenty of economic fury here and in Europe by the turn of the century, and the revolution in social media wasn’t far off. But there’s little doubt that the “War on Terror,” which became the first real foreign policy framework since the end of the Cold War, focused all of that anxiety toward an identifiable enemy, fracturing societies that had been held together by a 50-year consensus around personal liberties. If Obama were being honest, he’d probably say he told me so, and he’d be right.
IN THE MONTHS after 9/11 and before the invasion of Iraq, it was hard to get much perspective, and genuine patriotism mixed — as it always does — with a series of mindless gestures and clichés. Flag pins became mandatory even for reporters, peace songs were effectively banned, Republicans brought “freedom fries” and “freedom toast” into the lexicon to protest French misgivings about war. It became rote for politicians to say that the terrorists hated our way of life and we would never let them win. (To this day, when my dog snarls at some terrified Shiba Inu for no reason, I ask her why she hates freedom.)
Twenty-five years on, though, with the benefit of distance and experience, we can ask some questions we couldn’t ask then. And one of them is what the violent extremists who sent those suicide planes into our buildings really hoped to achieve. Did Osama bin Laden think he could win a holy war with America? Did we ultimately frustrate his script for the downfall of the West, or did we simply play our part?
Terrorism is, by its nature, asymmetrical. Whether it’s the Viet Minh under the French, or the IRA in Britain, or Al Qaeda, there’s an inherent understanding that the terrorist can’t win a conventional war against an obviously superior military force. What the terrorist seeks is destabilization of the status quo. His desperate act is an igniter in search of fuses; the goal is to set off a chain reaction inside the fortress that can’t be controlled, to disrupt order with chaos and see what shakes out. The terrorist knows this will likely cause his own people suffering in the short run, but that’s part of the point. He believes the occupier to be a soulless monster, and by reducing it to its basest instincts, he hopes to bare its nature to the world.
We’re seeing this play out, in real time, in Israel. The leaders of Hamas, their military options exhausted and their political goals slipping away, could not have been under any illusion that they would drive out the Israeli occupiers by savagely killing and mutilating more than a thousand innocent people. They must have hoped that Israel would react with blind fury and cruelty, resorting to the instinct for all-out annihilation that its leaders had long managed to suppress. Nearly three years later, Israel has tumbled from legitimatized power to international pariah, its politics riven by disunity, its moral authority in shambles. Do we think Hamas really cares that more than 70,000 of its own people have died in the carnage? Its repugnant leaders almost certainly consider that a cost worth paying in the broader context of history. What they have achieved, in political terms, has exceeded their most feverish dreams.
The Israelis should have looked across the Atlantic and learned something from our own experience. America on Sept. 10, 2001, was an unchallenged superpower at peace — vexed by social and economic divisions, yes, but still stable enough to survive a disputed election with its political consensus intact. A quarter century later, we find ourselves fighting a third unsuccessful war in the Middle East, our society more divided and our politics more poisoned than any time since the 1800s, a foundation of laws imperiled after 250 years of durability, immigrants hunted down like animals by masked agents, violence and extremism on the rise from both right and left, truth and intellectualism in retreat. This is not solely the fallout from Sept. 11, 2001, but it is the result of a series of events that, were you able to hit a rewind button and live it all again in reverse, would lead you directly back to that day. If bin Laden meant for his attack to be the first in a series of similarly epic crimes, then he was soundly defeated — no small achievement for American soldiers and spies. But if his goal was to destabilize America and bring out the worst of our nature, then he may have pulled off the most successful terrorist attack in history.
Over and over we told ourselves, in that agonizing moment, that the terrorists would never win. A quarter century later, it’s getting hard to argue they didn’t.