MAGA attacks on Kamala Harris' stepdaughter threaten to backfire on Donald Trump

MAGA thought leaders can't stop proving that they are weird, just as Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate, Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, have described them.

Last week, Ann Coulter and other Republican bottom-feeders grossed normal people out by mocking Guz Walz for getting emotional during his dad's speech at the Democratic National Convention. The insults didn't just prove that the self-appointed protectors of "family values" wouldn't know a loving family if they saw one. It was a reminder that the Trump campaign's strategy continues to be appealing to ugly, bitter people with a message of resentment. 

But the Walzes aren't the only family whose evident happiness infuriates the extremely online MAGA movement. Harris' family has drawn ire, as well. Especially her stepdaughter, 25-year-old model and designer Ella Emhoff, whose creativity, beauty and easygoing love for her family has sent many on the right into paroxysms of rage. The daughter of Harris' husband, Doug Emhoff, triggers the incel-minded online right by being a Brooklyn hipster who rejects the tiresome conservative rules for how women are allowed to dress or behave. In response, Donald Trump's fanboys are in a total meltdown, unable to accept the existence of a woman who doesn't care what they think of her. And they can't hide that they're furious that she looks great doing so. 

In the real world, Ella Emhoff, who graduated from Parsons School of Design and has a modeling contract with IMG, is being declared "a fashion icon" for her effortless pairing of high fashion with her quirky tastes. 

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To normal people, Emhoff's choice to wear a goofy "Harris/Walz" trucker hat with an elegant Helmut Lang top is fun and keeping with the high spirits at the DNC. To the MAGA right, however, her self-presentation is unacceptable. Richard Hanania, whose rise as a conservative "intellectual" was stymied by the revelation that he writes neo-Nazi-level white supremacist stuff under a pseudonym, angrily snarled that "this is pretty much the nightmare scenario for most people with a daughter."

It's yet another sign of how out of touch and frankly weird the MAGA right is. No, most Americans would not find it a "nightmare" to have a daughter who is successful, popular and confident. Most parents would feel how Doug Emhoff appears to feel: proud of the smart, independent woman he helped raise.

But all this "daughter" talk is hand-waving. The message to the bitter men of MAGA is about something else entirely. "This is why you don't have a wife" is the subtext of this grievance. "Because the cute girls would rather move to Brooklyn and cuddle a cat than have anything to do with you." 

Despite his pretense of speaking for the majority, Hanania, a major contributor to Project 2025, is yet another MAGA weirdo. In the past, he's denounced "race-mixing" and sneered about the "ugly, secular and barren White self-hating and Jewish" women he believes are betraying their feminine duties to be obedient helpmeets whose only ambition is having lots of children. “Women simply didn’t evolve to be the decision makers in society,” he wrote in one piece, arguing “women’s liberation = the end of human civilization.” His comments echo the much-panned, repeated griping of Trump's running mate, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, that childless women are "miserable cat ladies" and "sociopaths." 

Hanania is not an outlier in MAGA, but typical of a demographic Trump and Vance have geared their campaign around attracting: Bitter men who would rather gripe about "wokeness" than take responsibility for their personal failings.

As the Associated Press reported earlier this month, Trump's team thinks he can win big with male voters under 50 with a message of unapologetic misogyny and toxic masculinity. Aja Romano at Vox wrote Friday that Trump has been doing the rounds on bro-centric podcasts, some of whom also give airtime to accused rapists and white supremacists. (Both terms also fairly describe Trump.) Max Read wrote at his newsletter, Trump's campaign has a "commitment to d*ps**t outreach." 

That's why it's wrong to think the Trump campaign picked Vance without vetting. Vance was chosen as part of this strategy. His near-constant opining on the reproductive status of strangers is about appealing to crappy dudes. Same with his agreement that "the whole purpose of the post-menopausal female" is to help raise a man's kids so he doesn't have to. It's about openly appealing to men like Hanania, who think women exist to clean up after men and have their babies — and who are furious when women insist they have value outside of being unpaid servants for men. 

It's because Trump's campaign has cultivated this fanbase of malcontents that we're seeing such an unhinged reaction to Ella Emhoff. She is the opposite of the imaginary "tradwife" peddled on social media to profit off the sad fantasies of right-wing men. She's got tattoos and dresses more to please herself than to pander to the outdated tastes of MAGA men. Even more frightening is that she presents as intelligent and self-possessed. Worst of all is that she looks good doing all of it, disproving MAGA claims that independence leaves women as "miserable cat ladies" who will never attract attention or love. 

MAGA can't stop bagging on this young woman for the sin of just being herself. As Media Matters documented, 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's "covered in tattoos," which is held out as proof that Doug Emhoff "messed up." (Real men, to the MAGA right, control their daughter's body from her skin to her hymen to how she dresses. Not weird at all!) They said she wore a "man's suit" and looked like "something out of a horror film." They were especially incensed that her father showed affection for his fun, fashionable daughter, and freaked out that he gave his daughter a fatherly side hug during the convention.

Perhaps they're mad he's not more like Trump, who's publicly fantasized about dating his daughter, Ivanka. "Aides said he talked about Ivanka Trump's breasts, her backside, and what it might be like to have sex with her, remarks that once led John Kelly to remind the president that Ivanka was his daughter," one former aide of Trump wrote. 

Vance's catastrophic poll numbers, however, show there are real risks to the Trump campaign of pandering so heavily to creeps. The majority of Americans find it weird when men have an unhinged loathing of women who diverge from their "tradwife" fantasies. As Sarah Longwell discovered for her "Focus Group" podcast, most voters are repulsed by Vance's constant griping in years past about "cat ladies," suggesting there's something wrong with him that he cares this much about the personal choices of strangers. The attacks on Emhoff only add to the weirdness. The protesting-too-much quality suggests her critics can't admit to themselves that she's cute. Their misogynist ideology cannot allow that it's attractive when a woman has a personality and isn't just a docile helpmeet. 

Vance is still scrambling to justify his "miserable cat ladies" comments. On "Meet the Press" Sunday, he insisted his fixation on the uterine activity of strangers makes him "a normal human being." He falsely insisted it was a one-time joke, ignoring that there were at least 14 clips of various public appearances where he complained, at length, about women not making enough babies to suit his tastes. (And that's not even counting the "postmenopausal females" weirdness.) But he continued to insist he was in the right to bash the private childbearing decisions of strangers. As the Emhoff attacks show, it's a trap that the Trump campaign built for themselves. They want to win over the worst men in the nation by appealing directly to their controlling, misogynist desires. In the process, however, they're creeping everyone else out.