On Grandmothers, Capitalism, and Trump’s New Lisp

It’s time to talk about politics yet again.

I’m trying to make the politics post a weekly feature, but at the rate the race is going it might become daily for all I know. I’m both glad and horrified that we’ve only got about eighty days left.

Unfortunately, this time around, I don’t get to squeal about how personable and sweet Tim Walz seems to be, or how all the extroverts are having a fine time at Kamala Harris’s rallies. This week, most of the news has been stolen by the odious Donald Trump and the even worse J. D. Vance. I do not like Vance. I do not like Vance a bit. But it’s important to me to try and understand Vance, because he’s a Catholic and I’m a bad Catholic. I can see his nasty, heterodox notions about women and families permeating certain Catholic subcultures even though they fly in the face of Catholic teaching, so it’s important to me to call them out for what they are.

Please refer to my earlier remarks about voting and the greater good. You’re not in sin if you disagree with me on politics, and any attempt to accuse me of killing unborn babies by refusing to vote Republican will compel me to laugh in your face. And that’s all I’ll say about that today.

Now, onto the news. This week, Donald Trump had an online interview with the Tesla CEO and Twitter’s weird stepdad, Elon Musk. This went about as well as you might think. The interview didn’t start until nearly an hour late, with 30 minutes of silence Elon blamed on a DDOS attack that miraculously didn’t harm the rest of X/Twitter, and then there were ten minutes of elevator music. People joked that this was the first time they’d heard a 40-minute Trump interview with no lies in it. Then we got two hours of Elon saying “Mmm-hmm, uh huh” while Trump rambled. He talked about nuclear war, at one point agreeing with his host that the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki weren’t that bad. He said that if global warming happened, he’d own more beachfront property, which is just the plot of Superman 1978. He slurred his words as he often does, but he had a brand new severe lisp that nobody had ever heard before. Nobody seems to have an explanation for the lisp. It was so pronounced that when I heard a clip of it the next day, I honestly thought it was a comedian doing a nasty impression of Trump.

There’s nothing bad about being a person who has a speech impediment, of course. I’ve defended Joe Biden from mocking for his stutter many times. A person can suffer from a bad speech impediment while being mentally completely sound. But it’s alarming when a person develops a brand new speech impediment overnight. Remember, Trump was shot at about a month ago. We’ve seen no official medical report about the injuries to the side of his head. He, himself, claims the bullet pierced his ear; once he said “earlobe,” an impossibility. His son claimed the bullet took off the top of his ear, which is also impossible. No, I’m not suggesting a conspiracy theory here. I’m telling you to use your eyes. The blood was smeared high up on Trump’s face during the shooting, and the next day he was sporting an odd bandage taped to the TOP of his ear, with the lobe visibly intact, so his earlobe wasn’t pierced. Within ten days, the ear was completely healed; we have multiple photos confirming this. Strictly speaking, it may not be 100% outside the realm of physical possibility that an AR bullet could pierce somebody’s ear without blowing their brains out, though it’s something out of Ripley’s Believe It Or Not. But there’s no way the cartilage would heal or grow back like that if it was either pierced or cut off. He simply wasn’t pierced by a bullet. He may have been hit by shrapnel, or I suppose he may have been barely grazed by the bullet. And that matters a great deal, because a graze from an AK bullet isn’t a minor injury. The bullet is going so fast that it can cause a severe concussion. Brain damage from a bullet graze can cause lack of balance, confusion and other cognitive impairment– and, yes, it can meddle with the way you speak. We, the voters, need to know if Trump had a severe concussion so we can judge whether he ought to have the nuclear codes. Maybe that’s not the reason for the new lisp at all. Maybe Trump usually wears dentures and had them out for the interview. But this demonstrates why we need transparency about a political candidate’s medical conditions, and we haven’t got any about that shooting. That worries me.

Meanwhile, we’ve got another rediscovered audio clip from J. D. Vance.

Did I mention I can’t stand J. D. Vance?

In this little gem, an officious podcaster called Eric Weinstein mentions that the “sole purpose of post-menopausal females” is to provide childcare, and Vance happily agrees. I’d be tempted to let him off the hook if all he did was say “yes,” because sometimes an awkward person like Vance will blurt out “yes” in answer to a question and only realize what they’ve affirmed later. I, myself, am every bit as awkward as J. D, and I’ve often “yes’d” a question and then had to say “wait, no!” and explain myself. But Vance definitely didn’t do that. He went on to tell a story about the time his newborn child wasn’t sleeping through the night, so his wife’s mother took an entire year off from her job to be a live-in nanny. He called this a “weird, unadvertised benefit of marrying an Indian woman.” He made some gruff remarks about the way grandparents unfortunately “spoil” the children. And he went into a diatribe about how “liberals” want to invest money in daycares where children are raised by other people instead of letting grandparents help with children.

I want to give Vance the tiniest, slimmest little hair of credit for the one thing on which he and I agree. I do think that it’s good when families can come together to help each other raise the children, especially when the children are babies. I think that the world is better when it’s centered around helping families help one another instead of finding places to stow the children while both parents have to work all day to maintain a decent standard of living. A social safety net, which is a necessary thing, should be designed to help families care for one another instead of to warehouse people. But I don’t think “liberalism” is the culprit for families not getting the help they need. I think capitalism is. In the 20th century, cold, hard, brutal capitalism invented the nuclear family where only Mom and Dad raise the children, instead of more traditional notions of a whole extended family or oikos where relatives, friends and neighbors support one another. It’s because our society is centered around squeezing every penny we can out of the people and resources around us that it’s so difficult to raise a baby. A society that idolizes money sacrifices people to money. A society that idolizes money will also denigrate unpaid, traditionally feminine forms of labor such as being a housewife, in favor of traditionally masculine tasks. But that’s not liberalism’s fault.

But none of that was Vance’s point. Vance’s point was to underline that he thinks women are tools to be used. Younger women are to be used to make babies, and older women are to be used to care for babies. It’s an especially hair-raising look when a white man boasts that one of the perks of marrying a brown woman is getting her mother as a maid.

My jaw dropped when Vance mentioned in passing that the mother-in-law he’d used for free labor for a year was a biology professor at the University of California, San Diego. Vance himself is a venture capitalist. His profession is turning large amounts of money into enormous amounts of money. He gives people who are already affluent capital to start businesses so that they can get wealthier. He doesn’t add anything to society except enriching the rich. His mother-in-law is a professor. She teaches people. She enriches society by increasing others’ knowledge. Her job is a lot more valuable to society than his. If she wanted to take a sabbatical to help care for her grandson, that’s wonderful. I love caring for babies as well. But arguably, her profession as a teacher is worth a lot more to society than Vance’s as a capitalist. Yet Vance saw her as a servant, because she’s a woman and he’s not. The man does not think women are human. I don’t know how he could possibly make this clearer.

In addition to all of this, I’m nervous about the way he talked about grandparents “spoiling” his children. If that were just an isolated comment, I wouldn’t be concerned. But Vance doesn’t seem to like his children. He never says nice things about them when you’d expect a politician to do so. He was caught on camera, in a campaign stop where politicians are supposed to look jolly and pleasant, nastily snatching away his daughter’s chocolate milk and grousing at her for drinking so much of it. He growled “shut the hell up” at his son while on the phone with Trump. Maybe he’s nicer when he’s out of the public eye and not being recorded. But somehow, I doubt it.

I’ll be relieved when this election cycle is over and done with.

At least, I hope I will.