For Gus Waltz, last week’s Democratic National Convention in Chicago may not have been the light-hearted, fun-loving festivities enjoyed by adults inside Chicago’s 17,000-seat arena.
Vice presidential candidate Tim Walz’s son’s intense and emotional reaction to seeing his father onstage – “That’s my dad!” – thrust him into the spotlight as the star of the convention and also highlighted the 17-year-old Walz’s reported non-verbal learning disability, ADHD and anxiety disorders.
Conservative commentator Ann Coulter posted an article about Gus’s reaction on X, captioning it, “Weird story…” However, backlash against the spiteful post was swift: “He’s 17” trended on the platform, and Coulter, in a rare move, deleted the post.
“It’s understandable that children who love their parents may seem alien to you,” writes Tommy Vieter, a former Obama administration staffer turned liberal podcaster.
It’s never easy being the child of a prominent US candidate, but the latest generation of presidential and vice presidential candidates have it worse than most, and they can’t avoid the attention from both traditional and social media. Kamala Harris’ stepdaughter Ella Emhoff is a Brooklyn-based knitwear designer who is said to be helping her stepmother’s Gen Z-sensitive campaign. The future First Daughter appeared with Waltz every night of the convention, as did Donald Trump’s children, who appeared at the Republican National Convention in July. Chelsea Clinton was in Chicago for her parents’ speeches.
Presidents’ children, for better or worse, are firmly part of campaign strategies: In 1950, Harry S. Truman threatened to punch a Washington Post music critic who wrote that his piano-playing daughter Margaret sang poorly; John F. Kennedy’s young children featured prominently in Camelot coverage, and Nixon’s daughter was married in the White House.
Veteran Democratic consultant Hank Sheinkopf said the investigation continues but is being conducted largely by the White House press corps in response to the demands of public attention, with the president’s brothers also playing an often problematic role.
“Children and families are a bigger part of our politics than they’ve ever been. They’re part of the modern American political story,” Sheinkopf said, “because families represent goodness, community and stability, and people who don’t have families don’t conform to the American church standard.”
This may help explain the controversy that erupted a few weeks ago over J.D. Vance’s “childfree cat lady” comments, as well as the furor over Joe Biden’s refusal to embrace Hunter Biden and Lunden Roberts’ daughter, 4-year-old Navye Roberts, as part of his family.
“It’s part of the American mythology that it’s all about family,” Sheinkopf adds. “Children and families are important in the American political discourse. They always have been and they always will be.”
But there are also caveats: There is a long history of disappointing, tragic, and even criminal outcomes, including the death of John F. Kennedy Jr. in a self-piloted plane crash, Eric Trump and Donald Jr., who were fined in a $250 million fraud trial involving their family, and most recently Hunter Biden, who goes on trial next month for tax evasion.
In his 2013 book Presidents’ Kids, historian Doug Weed describes a 40-page research paper he wrote in 1998 at the urging of George Bush (whose son, George W., also became president).
“I struggle to find the positive in a very dark situation,” Weed writes in the book’s introduction. “Despite the brutal examples of the past, each new generation of presidential children is full of hope and an almost naive ambition.”
During the convention, Chasten Buttigieg, husband of Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, wrote in a post on X that he hopes his children will be “moved to tears, like Gus Waltz, when they see me speak about the dreams and passion I have for our country.”
Neurodiversity has taken a back seat to issues such as gender and racial diversity, but Gus Waltz’s arrival is significant for the neurodiversity discussion, says Nancy Doyle, a British psychologist who specialises in neurodiversity conditions.
Doyle says neurodiverse people tend to be highly sensitive and experience life in extreme ways, like the look on Gus Waltz’s face when he saw his father, which he says is “fun to watch” and shines a welcome spotlight on different people’s experiences.
“It gives us an opportunity to discuss the issues,” says Doyle, who calls neurodiversity as politicized as gender and diversity. “Expressing emotions is seen as weakness because there are so many messages in society to suppress, ignore or overcome emotional thoughts.”
“There are cultural narratives that make us want to control our emotions in a certain way, but Gus just bares it all and goes all in. It’s the kind of piece that makes you go, ‘Wow, what is this?'”
While speakers at the convention spoke frequently about the threat posed by President Trump’s reelection, they spoke about the “joy” of the Harris-Waltz duo more often than they spoke about “freedom.”
“Tonight is a night of joy,” New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker said. “Joy comes from our nominees, Kamala Harris and Tim Walz.”
But it was young Waltz who expressed that emotion so fully, Doyle says. It was a valuable counterargument to the perception that the emotional responses of neurodiverse children are always negative. “What we saw was an expression of pure joy, which was a valuable counterargument that challenged that stereotype,” Doyle says.
