Donald Trump’s political career should have been over and done with when he mocked a disabled reporter. But it was not.
So why should we be surprised that his minions are mocking Gus Walz, the 17-year-old son of Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Walz? Just when we thought they couldn’t go any lower, Ann Coulter showed up.
The far-right bomb thrower expressed on X what many of her followers no doubt were afraid to say out loud. She called Gus Walz, a neurodivergent teenager who wept openly while watching his father accept the Democratic nomination, “weird.”
She tweeted a photo of the weeping teenager — who proudly shouted out, “That’s my dad!” — with the caption, “Talk about weird.”
It is hard to imagine a more despicable thing. Coulter is vile and vicious. And every goodhearted Republican ought to call her out and denounce her.
But if you do that, you’re going to have to admit what you’ve allowed to pass as legit for your presidential candidate, who believes he is entitled to “personal attacks” on everyone he doesn’t like or who opposes him.
“You’re going to have to admit what you’ve allowed to pass as legit for your presidential candidate.”
Spades have been broken, and now you are playing a game where anything goes.
Coulter was not alone in mocking a 17-year-old boy who is proud of his father and is man enough to cry in public. Others joined her Trump-inspired mockery, and some said things too vile to publish here.
To borrow a phrase from one of the mockers, their assaults are the product of the spoiled semen of the most flawed presidential candidate in American history. For nine years now, Trump has inspired the worst in his followers, causing them to mock, assault, desecrate, demean and vilify people who do not meet their own weird norms.
And let us be clear on this point as well: This culture of name-calling and vilifying resonates with the evangelical church because they perfected it before Trump. American evangelicals are the original purveyors of racist slurs and misogynistic sermons and homophobic rants. No wonder they can’t call out Trump’s nasty rhetoric.
What’s even worse here is that the crowd claiming to hold up “family values” has no value for real families at all. That language has been exposed as a ruse.
If you really care about families, you should celebrate the victories of IVF, you should honor children with brain differences, you should care about feeding hungry children, you should celebrate the diversity of families.
None of this will make any difference to Trump’s most loyal followers. They have drunk the Kool-Aid and already shown us there is nothing their hero can do or say that will sway their devotion to him. We can only pray they will someday come to their senses.
Those who mock Gus Walz mock God. They mock the Creator of all living things. They mock the giver and sustainer of life. They mock the life and ministry of Jesus himself, whose entire public ministry was to point us to the Father. Through parables and prophecies, Jesus shouted out to all who would hear, “That’s my Father!”
Mark Wingfield serves as executive director and publisher of Baptist News Global. He is the author of Honestly: Telling the Truth About the Bible and Ourselves and Why Churches Need to Talk About Sexuality. His brand-new book is Troubling the Truth and Other Tales from the News.
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