US Democrats have spent recent days trying out a relatively new attack line on Donald Trump: that he is weird. The tactic is almost certainly calibrated to resonate with young and independent voters who, polls show, are moving from marked disinterest in the now-dropped matchup between Joe Biden and his presidential predecessor to engagement in the 100-day contest between Trump and Kamala Harris.
In a press release Thursday, vice-president and presumptive Democratic nominee Kamala Harris issued a list of the main takeaways of what Trump had given the American people. “Is Donald Trump OK?” the X message said. The seventh of nine entries was: “Trump is old and quite weird?”
At a fundraising event in Massachusetts on Saturday, Harris tried out the line again, describing what Trump and running mate JD Vance had been saying about her as “just plain weird”.
“I mean that’s the box you put that in,” Harris said after Trump had called her “a bum” the previous day and Vance disparaged her in 2021 as a “childless cat (lady)”.
The thing is, normalcy bias prevents people from listening when you call them rapists, fascists, totalitarians, and all those other things they actually are. But “weird”? Weird is obvious, and it cuts into the Republican brand to the bone.
Trump’s whole appeal is based on a fiction of him representing the common man; the “blue collar billionaire”. More than that, the Republican party has built their entire brand for decades on a sort of radical normalcy, on being the voice of the “silent majority”, on being the representatives of “real America” against those latte liberal elites from the coasts. “Weird” takes all the wind out of those sails. They don’t actually represent middle America; they’re way too out there for that. And it’s long past time somebody said so.
And I sincerely doubt Austinites are going to flock to Trump because of the “weird” thing. Austinites are the kind of weird that Republicans have been trying to suppress for decades, and they know it.