Over the past few years, Donald Trump’s critics have called him many names. He’s a threat to democracy; a “Cheeto-dusted cartoon villain”; “America’s Hitler”; the “liar-in-chief”; a predator and a con artist. Some of these digs are more cutting than others, yet none has taken the wind out of Trump’s sails quite like the one Minnesota governor — and, as of Tuesday, Kamala Harris’s pick for vice-president — Tim Walz offered during the veepstakes media blitz. Of the former president and his running mate J.D. Vance, Walz made a simple, stinging assessment: “These guys are just weird.” He later doubled down, saying, “These are weird people on the other side. They want to take books away. They want to be in your exam room. That’s what it comes down to. Don’t go sugarcoating this — these are weird ideas.”
Plain, to the point, and impossible to argue with, “weird” has quickly become the tagline of the 2024 election. A few days later, Walz tweeted a clip of Trump talking (not for the first time) about the fictional serial killer Hannibal Lecter, writing, “Say it with me: weird.” Shortly after, a press release from Harris’s team summarized a Fox News interview with her opponent, noting in its bulleted list of key conclusions that “Trump is old and quite weird?” She’s since said that Trump’s “wild lies about [her] record and some of what he and his running mate are saying, it is just plain weird,” while her spokesperson asserted that Vance had “spent all week making headlines for his out-of-touch, weird ideas.” By NBC News’ count, the Harris campaign’s X account has called Trump “weird” at least 14 times since Walz debuted the burn.
So far, the strategy appears to be working. In a sure sign that “weird” has wormed its way under his skin, Trump countered in a podcast interview last week that “they’re the weird ones. Nobody has ever called me weird. I’m a lot of things, but weird I’m not.” Which, come on! Set aside the politics: Trump has repeatedly made horny remarks about his daughter’s body, once going so far as to say on daytime television that “if Ivanka weren’t my daughter, perhaps I’d be dating her.” He has blamed health advisories about asbestos on a Mafia-orchestrated smear campaign. He encouraged his followers to inject bleach as a COVID cure. He spends an unusual amount of time ranting and worrying about sharks.
As for Trump’s second-in-command: Vance would like to give votes to the nation’s children and disenfranchise people who don’t have kids. He baselessly accused Biden of trying to murder MAGA voters with illegal fentanyl. He speculated that once Roe v. Wade was overturned, George Soros would be flying “a 747 to Columbus to load up disproportionately Black women” and ferry them to California to get abortions. He will talk about how he believes in the Devil during a stump speech. There’s a reason so many people believed that this man had sex with a couch: his palpably weird vibes.
Calling these Republicans weird is funny because it’s true. It also mirrors the schoolyard-bully insults Trump adores. “Little Marco,” “Sleepy Joe,” “Crazy Nancy” — “Weird Don” fits neatly within that canon. It’s a slight that meets him on his level, and it’s also a hard charge to beat. As we will all remember from being 6 years old, “I’m not weird, you’re weird” is a limp defense. Any attempt to disprove it only further fuels the fire. “They called us weird so I’ll call them weirder. That’s what I used to do back in high school,” Senator Marco Rubio quipped, inadvertently ceding the central point. “You know what’s really weird? Soft on crime politicians like Kamala allowing illegal aliens out of prison so they can violently assault Americans,” said Trump’s oldest son, Don Jr., in a rejoinder that doesn’t land but does sound a touch hysterical. Both he and the State Freedom Caucus Network circulated images of Harris posing with drag queens, one of the right’s favorite moral panics. “Your party’s obsession with drag shows is creepy,” as Connecticut senator Chris Murphy put it on X. “Your candidate’s idea to strip the vote away from people without kids is weird. The right-wing book-banning crusade is super odd. It’s just so so far outside the mainstream.”
That’s another reason for the unmatched deflating power of “weird.” The GOP is increasingly the bastion of MAGA extremists. Earlier this year in Missouri, for example, a Republican hopeful went viral after taking a flamethrower to a sex-ed book and an LGBTQ encyclopedia for teens. South Dakota governor Kristi Noem knocked herself off Trump’s VP shortlist when she bragged in her memoir about shooting her 14-month-old dog. As Republicans pursue hard-line abortion bans that outlaw termination in all or most cases — something the majority of U.S. adults oppose — they’ve placed fertility treatments on the legislative chopping block, their bizarre obsession with embryos running headlong into their fixation on the national birth rate. At the same time, they’ve latched onto unvarnished racism and white-supremacist ideology. Calling them weird reminds us that these behaviors are not the norm and (one hopes) not representative of the average person’s views.
It also makes for a welcome change from the fear-based rhetoric — “fascist,” “demagogue” — that Democrats have been using to frame their opponents’ out-there policies. Yes, the Republicans’ proposals are frightening, authoritarian, and dangerous, but it’s exhausting to sustain so much anxiety over so many years. “Weird,” by contrast, is an insult everyone can understand. It is dismissive. It operates on a removed, unruffled, above-that plane. It can’t be bothered to disprove a point to which logic doesn’t apply. Unlike Hillary Clinton’s clunky, moralizing “basket of deplorables,” or Biden’s daunting “battle for the soul of a nation,” “weird” doesn’t take itself, or its opponent, too seriously. That’s where “weird” really succeeds: It laughs at people who absolutely cannot laugh at themselves.
This sets up a winning contrast with Harris, who is herself weird in a way that reads charming rather than spooky. It sometimes sounds like she says whatever random thing pops into her brain, laughs through it, and then pivots with confidence to the task at hand. Her “You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?” speech is a prime example, at once nonsensical and profound, a disarming combination. Republicans have tried to weaponize the coconut clip against her, but the sense that Harris is in on the joke defangs their attempts at ridicule. It’s very hard to laugh at someone who’s already laughing at themselves.
Having hit upon a successful communications strategy, though, Democrats now run the risk of wearing it out. If they use “weird” in every speech, ad, interview, and tweet, they will bleed it of its flippant, off-the-cuff appeal. As was true with the brat memes, there’s a fine line between current and cringe that Democrats haven’t historically excelled at navigating. Brevity is the soul of wit — let’s hope they also understand it’s the key to conquering a trend cycle.
