As we bate our collective breath for an October surprise, the American electorate is celebrating an even more beloved political tradition. Ladies and gents, this is Backstabbing September, that magical month when the most disgruntled members of a candidate’s extended family take to the airwaves, the papers, social media platforms—to let the public know that their politically ambitious relative is a monster and utterly unfit for office.
Last week’s headline betrayal came courtesy of a group of Tim Walz’s Midwestern relatives, who posed for a photo announcing their support for Donald Trump, complete with a giant “TAKE AMERICA BACK” banner and matching MAGA aesthetic t-shirts that read NEBRASKA WALZ’S FOR TRUMP. In addition to triggering a meltdown among copy editors everywhere (Pro tip: The plural of “Walz” is “Walzes”), the photograph was met with outrage from Tim’s more loyal relatives: His sister said she didn’t recognize the people in it, and his mother identified them as distant cousins.
But unfortunately for Tim, this was not the first dissenting Walz to throw a wrench in the works of his vice-presidential aspirations. The week before the faithless Nebraskans made their social media debut, Tim’s brother, Jeff, wrote a Facebook post publicly declaring his opposition to Tim’s ideology.
Nobody has been enjoying this spectacle more than Donald Trump, who thanked Jeff on Truth Social, writing: “I look forward to meeting you soon!” But Trump is far from safe when it comes to backstabbing relatives. He’s got Mary Trump, the grudge-holding niece whose loathing for her Uncle Donald is so intense that she’s published three books about it in four years. (Her new memoir, Who Could Ever Love You, is out today.) And then there’s her brother, Fred Trump III, who hopped aboard the Trumps Against Trump train this summer with his own less-than-complimentary memoir about the family. Subtitle: “The Trumps and How We Got This Way.”
All told, the 2024 campaign cycle has seen more family drama than any other in recent memory; not since Barack Obama’s half brother told the BBC he’d be voting Republican in 2016 has the political discourse been so animated by the petty grudges of a bunch of nobodies who just happen to share a gene pool with someone running for office.
For this, we can probably credit the third-party presence of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—whose family not only put him on blast from the moment he announced his candidacy, but had been publicly condemning him as a weirdo conspiracy theorist for years. His withdrawal and endorsement of Donald Trump late last month yielded a bonus round of extra-strength denunciation when five of Kennedy’s siblings released a statement that read, in part: “Our brother Bobby’s decision to endorse Trump today is a betrayal of the values that our father and our family hold most dear.” A cousin, Jack Schlossberg, also tweeted, “Been saying it for over a year—RFKjr is for sale, works for Trump. Bedfellows and loving it.”
The question is, why are we so fascinated by these sibling rivalries, these obscure conflicts between cousins multiple-times-removed, the rogue at the heart of the dynasty? The most obvious explanation, probably, is that it’s like watching an episode of Succession in real life: the thrill, at once sordid and Shakespearean, of seeing a man taken down by his less powerful, but equally terrible, family members. Ah, the delicious frisson of ultimate betrayal. It’s George Steinbrenner firing Yogi Berra from the Yankees; it’s Petyr Baelish selling out Ned Stark. The shivving of candidates by their own family members is tailor-made for a moment in which we view politics more like a team sport than a civic exercise, rooting for the triumph of party not just over country, but over shared DNA and history, and maybe even basic human decency.
But there’s something else at work here, too. In these intensely polarized times, party affiliation has become a proxy for character. It appears at the top of our Tinder profiles, while young singles increasingly report that political differences are a dating dealbreaker. Public announcements—“if you voted for [whoever], unfriend and unfollow me”—proliferate on social media. Republicans instruct their Democratic family members not to bother coming for Thanksgiving; liberal parents live in terror that their children might bring home a conservative paramour.
As politics alienates us from an uncle here and a great-aunt there, it’s strangely comforting to imagine a politician’s own family is just as embattled. Completely apart from people like the Nebraska Walzes selling out their cousin for a news cycle’s worth of attention, an entire journalistic oeuvre has dedicated itself to promoting the idea that Kamala Harris’s father considers her a disappointment, or that Usha Vance is trapped in a loveless marriage to a man whose politics she hates, or that Melania Trump is actually a sleeper agent for the Democratic party sending coded cries for help behind her husband’s back.
Of course we want to watch people declare their own flesh and blood unfit for office, shattering the bonds of family for (allegedly) the sake of the greater good. Of course we are riveted by the Nebraska Walzes, and Mary Trump’s grudge. Of course we will click on the news that the Kennedys—a family that stood by their wayward sons as they schtupped starlets, lobotomized their children, and left innocent women to drown in the cars they drunkenly piloted into the sea—have come together to ostracize their brother for his intolerable endorsement of the Republican nominee.
Stars: They’re just like us! Freezing each other out over politics, secure in the zealous conviction that we cannot love anyone, not even family, whose voting habits we dislike.
Kat Rosenfield is a columnist at The Free Press. Read her piece, “The 2024 Election Is a Marvel Universe,” and follow her on X @katrosenfield.
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Use common sense here: disagree, debate, but don't be a .