Kamala Harris was accepting her party’s nomination for president of the United States. But Michelle Obama was still thinking about Gus Walz.
“I was touched to see Gus Walz’s joy when his dad @Tim_Walz took the stage last night,” the former first lady said of the vice presidential candidate’s 17-year-old son. “Thankful for you showing us all what real love looks like, Gus.”
She then added, “Let’s be a nation that embraces this kind of warmth and vulnerability, instead of making fun or mocking it. We could all use some of Gus’s example in our own lives.”
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It’s not hard to deduce who she was talking about.
Earlier in the day on Thursday, conservative outrage machine Ann Coulter deleted her tweet about Gus Walz’s emotional reaction to his father’s speech the night before that simply read, “Talk about weird...”
It was only after it was pointed out to her that Gus Walz is neurodivergent that Coulter says she decided to take down her heartless mockery, though she did not offer any form of apology. “I took it down as soon as someone told me he’s austistc [sic],” she said, misspelling the diagnosis, “but it’s Democrats who go around calling everyone weird thinking it’s hilariously funny.”
Michelle Obama, meanwhile, found herself on the receiving end of Coulter’s derision in 2016 after Melania Trump was accused of plagiarizing her predecessor’s convention speech.
“It’s impossible to plagiarize twaddle,” Coulter said at the time. “Melania’s speechwriter didn’t write them, but neither did Michelle’s speechwriter. ‘The only limit to what you achieve is your dreams’… We can go to a Rite Aid right now and find a million Hallmark cards that say it. ‘Your word is your bond’? They think Michelle Obama copyrighted that?”
In addition to Obama’s more subtle denunciation of Coulter’s tweet about Walz, there were much more pointed criticisms from figures like Rosie O’Donnell, who posted, “Talk about a cruel heartless woman–she’s the worst” and The View’s Ana Navarro, who told Coulter to “leave Gus Walz the f--- alone.”
Star Wars star Mark Hamill also threw his support behind Gus, responding to another commentator who said they felt “gutted” watching the emotional DNC moment. “Same here. Can’t wait to see him visiting his dad in the WH. (consider this a Gus Walz appreciation tweet),” Hamill wrote.
