In the hours after Vice President Kamala Harris became the de facto Democratic nominee for president and Gov. Andy Beshear was lauded as a potential pick for vice president, I received a text message about Beshear from a MAGA man in my family: Maybe he can control her.

Words I do not recall hearing, in my lifetime, about any male candidate for president.

When asked about a potential Harris-Beshear ticket, state Sen. Damon Thayer, the Kentucky Senate’s floor leader, told Isaiah Kim-Martinez of WHAS11, “I don’t know if Kamala Harris is dumb enough to pick Andy Beshear, but maybe she is.”

Harris graduated from college and law school; served as a prosecutor; was elected attorney general in one of the most populous states; was elected to the U.S. Senate in 2017; and was chosen as the vice presidential nominee in 2020, a role in which she has honorably served for three and a half years.

A hardworking, accomplished woman reduced, in the parlance of Thayer, to dumb.

In former President Donald Trump’s Republican Party (and it is his party now) childishness and cruelty and pettiness reign, the primary focus long ago shifted from policy to ad hominem name-calling, and women’s accomplishments are relegated to irrelevance.?

And then there is her laugh.

In a sit-down interview with Laura Ingraham on FOX News, the GOP presidential nominee said about Harris, “She’s crazy. That laugh, that’s a laugh of a crazy person.” Ingraham tried to help him out by cutting him off and saying, “I like laughter,” but Trump wasn’t budging. “Not her laughter,” he said.

This, on the tails of a laughable Republican Party convention lacking in gravitas and in which Hulk Hogan and Kid Rock were headliners and none of the conservative, standard bearers with names like Cheney, Bush or Romney played the smallest part while Mitch McConnell was booed.

As Heath Mayo, Christian conservative and founder of Principles First, wrote about today’s GOP, “The breathless outrage at the folks in drag from the same people who just last week eagerly cheered a porn star, a man who hit his wife in the face, and an adjudicated rapist who cheated on his wife with a stripper… is quite something. Selective morality is not morality.”

The Republican Party is no longer the party of family values or even a political party. That ship done sailed.

Today’s Republican Party is a steaming, smoldering cult of one personality, of a man found guilty of fraudulently paying a porn star to help his 2016 political campaign, who consistently calls women nasty and crazy or worse, was recently held liable in a court of law for sexual abuse, and laughs off his own old jokes about grabbing women by the p***y.

As my Grandma Ann would say with an eye roll, he’s a real knee-slapper, that one.

When Martha Raddatz at ABC’s This Week asked New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu about Trump’s rally comments indicating that Christians would no longer need to worry about voting four years from now, he chuckled — yes, chuckled — and said, “I think that’s a classic Trumpism.”

On CBS’s Face the Nation, Sen. Lindsay Graham was giggling — yes, giggling — before host Robert Costa could even ask about the voting remark. Graham’s giggling continued as Costa asked a serious question about the right to vote, so much so that Costa said, “You’re laughing, what do you believe he’s trying to say?”

And not to be outdone, Sen. John Kennedy, R-La., told Neil Cavuto on FOX News that Harris “needs to prove to the American people that she’s a serious person. Margaret Thatcher didn’t giggle. Golda Meir didn’t giggle. … Many Americans think that the vice president is a little bit of a ding dong.” Cavuto tried multiple times to direct Kennedy to talk about policy, saying, “Doesn’t it look petty to judge her on this level?” but Kennedy, like his cult leader, dug in, doubling down on “she’s a bit of a ding dong.”

Funny, I haven’t heard any GOP complaints about their powerful, supposedly serious, elected men laughing or making comments about ding dongs or calling the vice president dumb.

I wonder why.

I also haven’t heard anyone, including my Trump-voting family member, call for Trump’s VP choice to control him.

It’s a real mystery.