For Gus Walz, the Democratic national convention in Chicago last week may not have been the light, good vibes fest that it was for adults in the 17,000-seat Chicago arena.
The intense emotional response of vice-president hopeful Tim Walz’s son to seeing his father on stage – “That’s my dad!” – thrust him into the spotlight as the convention’s breakout star and with them raised the issue of nonverbal learning disorders, ADHD and an anxiety disorder that the 17-year-old is reported to experience.
The conservative commentator Ann Coulter posted an article on X about Gus’s reaction, captioning it: “Talk about weird …” But the backlash against the mean-spirited post was swift. “He’s 17” trended on the platform and Coulter – unusually – took the post down.
“I can see why a child loving their parents would feel foreign to you,” wrote Obama staffer-turned-liberal podcaster Tommy Vietor.
It’s never been easy as the child of a high-profile US candidate, but the latest crop of presidential or vice-presidential hopeful offspring may be getting it worse than most, and there is no avoiding the spotlight of both traditional media and social media. Ella Emhoff, stepdaughter of Kamala Harris, is a Brooklyn-based knitwear designer and said to have a hand in her stepmum’s attuned campaign ear to generation Z. The prospective first daughter appeared nightly during the convention, along with Walz, as did Donald Trump’s kids at the Republicans’ convention in July. Chelsea Clinton was in Chicago for her parents’ speeches.
Presidential offspring are firmly a part of political electioneering strategy, for better or worse. In 1950, Harry S Truman threatened to beat up a Washington Post music critic who wrote that his piano-playing daughter, Margaret, sang flat. John F Kennedy’s young children featured prominently in reporting of Camelot; Nixon’s daughter got married in the White House.
The trail goes on, says the veteran Democratic consultant Hank Sheinkopf, largely as a function of the White House press corps responding to the demands of public interest, with presidential siblings also playing a part, often troubled.
“Children and families are a more prominent part of our politics than they’ve ever been – they’re part of the American political storytelling in the modern era,” Sheinkopf says, “because family represent goodness, community and stability and people who don’t have families don’t conform to those churchly American standards.”
Which may help to explain the controversy stirred up over JD Vance’s “childless cat ladies” comments several weeks ago or the anger over Joe Biden not accepting four-year-old Navy Roberts, daughter of Hunter Biden and Lunden Roberts, into the family fold.
“It’s part of the American mythology that families are everything,” Sheinkopf adds. “Children and families are significant in the discussion of American politics. Always were, always will be.”
But there are also cautions to observe, among them a long history of disappointing or tragic or even criminal outcomes, such as John F Kennedy Jr, who died in a self-piloted plane crash, Eric Trump and Don Jr, fined in the family’s $250m fraud trial, and more recently Hunter Biden, who goes on trial for tax fraud next month.
In a 2013 book, All the Presidents’ Children, the historian Doug Wead wrote of a 40-page, 1998 study he had been encouraged to write by George Bush, whose son George W also became president.
“I struggled to find a positive slant to a very dark picture,” Wead wrote in the book’s preface. “Despite the cruel examples that preceded them, each new generation of president’s children has been filled with hope and almost naive ambition.”
During the convention, Chasten Buttigieg, husband of the transportation secretary, Pete Buttigieg, posted on X that he hopes to inspire his children “so much that when they see me speak of the dreams and passion I have for my country they are moved to tears like Gus Walz was”.
The introduction of Gus Walz is significant to the discussion of neurodiversity, which has played a backseat to issues of gender and racial diversity, says Nancy Doyle, a UK psychologist specializing in the neurodivergent conditions.
Doyle says neurodivergent people tend to be highly sensitive and experience life at the extreme ends – as Gus Walz appeared at the sight of his father – that was “joyful to watch” as well casting a welcome spotlight on different people’s experiences.
“It gives us an opportunity to discuss the issue,” says Doyle, who characterizes neurodiversity as an area that is as politicized as gender and diversity. “Expressing emotion is seen as weak because there are so many messages in society to repress, ignore or overcome emotional thinking.”
“You’ve got a cultural narrative that makes us want to police our emotions in a certain way, and then you’ve got Gus who’s letting it all hang out and totally going for it. It made everyone go, ‘Wow, what’s that?’”
While speakers at the convention spoke frequently of a threat posed by a second Trump presidency, they spoke often of “joy” at a Harris-Walz ticket more frequently than they spoke of “freedom”.
“Tonight is about joy,” said the New Jersey senator Cory Booker. “Our nominees, Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, they bring the joy.”
But it was left to the younger Walz to fully inhabit that emotion, says Doyle, and it was a valuable counter to a perception that emotional reactions of children with neurodiverse characteristics are always negative. “What we saw was a pure expression of joy and a valuable counter-narrative to challenge that stereotype,” Doyle says.
