MAGA thought leaders continue to prove themselves to be weird, just as Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, have described them.
Last week, Ann Coulter and other left-wing Republicans disgusted normal people by mocking Guz Walz for getting emotional during his father’s speech at the Democratic National Convention. These insults not only prove that self-proclaimed “family values” advocates don’t know a loving family if they see one. They also serve as a reminder that the Trump campaign’s strategy continues to appeal to ugly, bitter people with a message of resentment.
They want to gain the trust of the nation’s worst men by appealing directly to their desires for control and misogyny.
But the Walzes aren’t the only family whose obvious happiness has infuriated the MAGA movement, which is very much online. Harris’s family has also drawn ire. Particularly her daughter-in-law, Ella Emhoff, a 25-year-old model and designer whose creativity, beauty and easy love for her family have sent many on the right into paroxysms of anger. The daughter of Harris’s husband, Doug Emhoff, has been the ire of the right online, as a Brooklyn hipster who rejects boring conservative rules about how women are allowed to dress or behave. In response, Donald Trump’s fanboys are having a meltdown, unable to accept the existence of a woman who doesn’t care what they think of her. And they can’t hide their anger that she looks so good doing it.
In the real world, Parsons School of Design graduate and IMG modeling contract holder Ella Emhoff has been hailed as a “fashion icon” for her ability to effortlessly blend high fashion with her quirky tastes.
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To normal people, Emhoff’s choice to wear a ridiculous “Harris/Walz” trucker hat with a sleek Helmut Lang top is amusing and in keeping with the DNC mood. To the MAGA right, however, his self-presentation is unacceptable. Richard Hanania, whose rise as a conservative “intellectual” was stunted by the revelation that he writes neo-Nazi-level white supremacist articles under a pseudonym, angrily declared that “this is pretty much the nightmare scenario for most people who have a daughter.”
It’s another sign of how disconnected and strange the MAGA right is. No, most Americans wouldn’t find it “nightmarish” to have a successful, popular, and confident daughter. Most parents would feel what Doug Emhoff seems to feel: proud of the smart, independent woman he helped raise.
But all this talk about “girls” is a red herring. The message to the bitter MAGA men is something else entirely. “That’s why you don’t have a wife,” is the subtext of the complaint. “Because all the pretty girls would rather move to Brooklyn and cuddle a cat than have to deal with you.”
Despite his claims to speak for the majority, Hanania, a top contributor to Project 2025, is another MAGA eccentric. In the past, he has decried “race mixing” and mocked “ugly, secular, sterile, self-hating Jewish white women” who, he said, betray their feminine duties by being obedient helpers whose only ambition is to have lots of children. “Women simply have not evolved to be the decision-makers of society,” he wrote in one post, arguing that “women’s liberation = the end of human civilization.” His comments echo Trump running mate Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio’s repeated and much-criticized complaints that childless women are “miserable pussy ladies” and “sociopaths.”
Hanania is not an outlier in the MAGA movement, but she is typical of a demographic that Trump and Vance have geared their campaigns to appeal to: bitter men who would rather complain about their “wokeness” than take responsibility for their personal failures.
As the Associated Press reported earlier this month, Trump’s team believes it can win big with male voters under 50 with a message of unapologetic misogyny and toxic masculinity. Vox’s Aja Romano wrote Friday that Trump has been making the rounds on bro-centric podcasts, some of which also give airtime to accused rapists and white supremacists. (Those two terms also pretty much describe Trump.) Max Read wrote in his newsletter that the Trump campaign has “committed to awareness d*ps**t” . ”
“That’s why you don’t have a wife,” is the implication of the complaint. “Because all the pretty girls would rather move to Brooklyn and cuddle a cat than have to deal with you.”
Which is why it’s wrong to think that the Trump campaign chose Vance without vetting him. Vance was chosen as part of this strategy. His near-constant opinions on the reproductive status of strangers are designed to appeal to sleazy guys. So is his agreement that “the purpose of a postmenopausal woman” is to help a man raise his children so he doesn’t have to. It’s meant to openly appeal to men like Hananiah, who think women exist to clean up after men and have their babies—and who are furious when women insist that they have value beyond being unpaid servants to men.
It’s because the Trump campaign cultivated this disgruntled fan base that we’re seeing such a furious reaction to Ella Emhoff. Emhoff is the opposite of the imaginary “tradwife” peddled on social media to prey on the sad fantasies of right-wing men. She gets tattoos and dresses more to please herself than to satisfy the outdated tastes of MAGA men. What’s even scarier is that she presents herself as a smart, confident woman. Worse still, she looks good in it all, which contradicts MAGA claims that independence turns women into “miserable cat ladies” who will never attract attention or love.
MAGA can’t help but criticize this young woman for the sin of simply being herself. As Media Matters reported, a chorus of conservative commentators like Tucker Carlson and Charlie Kirk lost their minds at the sight of this young woman. They complained that she was “covered in tattoos,” which was presented as proof that Doug Emhoff “made a mistake.” (Real men, to the right of MAGA, control their daughter’s body, from her skin to her hymen to the way she dresses. It’s really weird!) They said she was wearing a “man suit” and looked like “something out of a horror movie.” They were particularly furious that her father had shown affection for his fun, fashionable daughter, and freaked out that he had given his daughter a fatherly hug during the convention.
Perhaps they are angry that he is not more like Trump, who has publicly fantasized about a relationship with his daughter, Ivanka. “Aiders said he talked about Ivanka Trump’s breasts, her behind and what it would be like to have sex with her, remarks that once led John Kelly to remind the president that Ivanka was his daughter,” wrote a former Trump aide.
Vance’s dismal poll numbers, however, show that Trump’s campaign is taking real risks by appealing so much to perverts. Most Americans find it odd that men have an inordinate hatred for women who deviate from their fantasies of “traditional women.” As Sarah Longwell discovered for her podcast “Focus Group,” most voters are disgusted by Vance’s constant complaints in recent years about “cat ladies,” suggesting there is something wrong with him for caring so much about the personal choices of strangers. The attacks on Emhoff only add to the oddity. The overly protest-y nature suggests that her critics can’t admit that she’s cute. Their misogynistic ideology can’t accept that it’s attractive for a woman to have a personality and not just be a docile helper.
Vance is still trying to justify his “miserable pussies” comments. On “Meet the Press” Sunday, he insisted that his fixation on strangers’ uterine activity made him “a normal human being.” He falsely insisted that it was a one-off joke, ignoring that there were at least 14 clips from various public appearances in which he complained, in detail, that women weren’t having enough children for his taste. (And that’s not even counting the weirdness of “menopausal women.”) But he continued to insist that he had a right to criticize strangers’ private decisions to procreate. As Emhoff’s attacks show, this is a trap the Trump campaign has set for itself. They want to win over the worst men in the country by appealing directly to their desires for control and misogyny. But in doing so, they’re scaring everyone.
