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)”.
I get where you’re coming from, and you make a point with “deplorable” being meme-ified into some twisted identity thing. But I also think the collective “basket of deplorables” doesn’t apply here. Harris isn’t calling Trump supporters weird; she’s calling just him weird.
This does a few things: it keeps the focus on Trump, allowing supporters to distance themselves from the statement. The lack of attachment to any particular action, statements, belief, etc. lets a person think about it “nakedly.” Why is he weird?
Yes, we both know why, but this flips the script from the last 10 years from “here are various reasons why Trump is horrifying and could also be considered weird” to “Trump is weird, I’ll let you chew on that.”
It’s all in the delivery. Stating what he is without explaining why.
I think it’s worth returning a bit of agency to people in general to assess how they feel about that statement and come to their own conclusions. Edit: Especially because many of these people have attached themselves to Trump because they feel they have no agency otherwise. Could this be a means to cracking through the brainwashed masses? Something akin to, “wait, why am I idolizing this guy again?” Wishful thinking, yes, but being"plain weird" is such a broadly sweeping generalization that something should organically pop up in trump supporters’ brains, without our prompting.
I guess we’ll just have to see, but these aren’t people who “chew” on things in that way. If they were capable and willing to think critically and rationally about this, they wouldn’t be there in the first place.
These people aren’t just going to suddenly become rational overnight about their cult-like devotion to a man that they essentially worship as a demigod, because this time you said “weird” instead of “fascist.”
Principled criticisms, accurate names like Fascist, Dictator, joke names like Don Poorleone and Orange man that we’ve used before work with Democrats but cause the Trump cult to turn their brains off.
Weird might be just the word that plants the seedling of doubt in a handful of Trump supporters’ minds.