For the past eight years, Democrats have countered Donald Trump’s apocalyptic vision of the future with an approach that, ironically, plays into the former president’s rhetorical premise—warning us about his vision and debunking it.
That’s why it’s notable that Kamala Harris, her campaign, and other leading Democrats have leaned heavily into a message that Governor Tim Walz launched during a July 23 appearance on Morning Joe: Trump and J.D. Vance are weird. “Some of what [Trump] and his running mate are saying, it is just plain weird,” Harris said at her first fundraiser as presumptive Democratic nominee. When Trump appeared on Fox News last week, her campaign issued a bullet-pointed list of observations, including, “Trump is old and quite weird?” And over the weekend, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said: “Every day … it comes out Vance has done something more extreme, more weird, more erratic.”
What makes “weird” such an oddly effective line of criticism?
Most Democratic politicians, talking heads, policy wonks, and voters have known that Trump is weird since at least 2016. But for some reason, Democratic politicians don’t seem to have seriously tested this as a deliberate, sustained message in stump speeches or on cable news appearances. They frequently describe Trump as contemptible, even buffoonish and hapless, but never as simply strange. For eight years, they have been careful not to appear too dismissive and risk repeating their 2016 mistake of underestimating him and thinking the election is in the bag.
But in doing so they have overlooked the risk inherent in taking Trump too seriously: It permits him to set the rhetorical stage and (by extension) frame the subjects up for debate. Instead they compared him to historical dictators and painted him as a threat to democracy. That messaging, as Walz noted in a CNN appearance, gave Trump “too much credit” and “too much power.”
With the advent of the Walz-Harris “weird” framing, however, they are describing him as less akin to Hitler and more like the Saturday Night Live character Matt Foley, a hyperbolic motivational speaker with a dark vision of our future and a notably peculiar manner of speaking.
The notion of Trumpian weirdness is not itself novel. His most vociferous supporters have long been the subject of jokes: the uncle who ruins Thanksgiving, the QAnon Karen who smashes rainbow flag product displays. But that word, weird, has—weirdly—rarely been applied to Trump himself.
And this is strange because Trump is an objectively weird person. “Listen to the guy,” Walz pointed out. “He’s talking about Hannibal Lecter and shocking sharks and just whatever crazy thing pops into his mind.” To belabor the point: Normal politicians don’t have YouTube supercuts of their most bizarre verbal mannerisms and off-topic digressions. But Democrats have often taken Trump’s weirdness at face value, countering his odd statements or using them to highlight his declining mental state. Until now, though, they haven’t simply rhetorically nudged voters and whispered: “Get a load of this guy.”
Weird behavior is challenging to define. It’s a moving target based on a number of factors, like your tolerance for social awkwardness and stress, your cultural background, as well as the context of the situation that you’re in. It is akin to Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s attempt to define pornography: “I know it when I see it.”
But the acceptable contexts for weirdness are easier to define. John Waters can be weird. People who cover their bodies head to toe in metallic paint and do the robot on Michigan Avenue can be weird. Alfred Matthew Yankovic has had one of the most successful careers of any musician on the planet by harnessing our positive and fun associations with the word.
But we all agree that the president shouldn’t be a weirdo.
Now let’s get to the weird power of calling someone weird. As far as ad hominems go, it’s disarming. It lands so lightly—compared, say, with Trump’s hyperbolic use of the word evil—that when the dismissal fits, as it manifestly does with Trump and Vance, it preempts any effective retort. Take, for example, Vance’s recent disastrous attempts to clarify his own weird remarks about “childless cat ladies.” The more he pleads his case that he is not a weirdo, the weirder he comes across.
Anyone with siblings or who has worked in a setting with clear and unforgiving social hierarchies—like a school or the military—knows this. When the context fits, calling someone weird deflates and disempowers them. And the more they argue otherwise, the more attention they draw to their own peculiarities. It’s especially devastating against bullies who crave and rely upon being taken seriously.
I’m not arguing that calling someone weird demonstrates our best social tendencies, but it is a particularly effective way of handling bullies like Trump and Vance. It’s little surprise, then, that Walz originated the jibe: He was a public school teacher and lunch monitor for 20 years. You don’t leave that life with hair, and you don’t leave that life without effective rhetorical strategies for dealing with bullies.
What we’re experiencing is a relatively common phenomenon: We observe something that is so evident that we don’t think it warrants repetition, discussion, or analysis. If you asked me, “Do you think Trump is weird?” at any point over the past eight years, I would have said yes—obviously.
But sometimes the emperor’s proverbial lack of clothes is so apparent that no one bothers to express it. Democrats never explored that obvious aspect of Trump’s personality in messaging. Walz finally did, and now it feels like a refreshing but familiar revelation. It feels like Democrats are finally speaking to the way that many of us experience Trump—with a heavy dose of fear, sure, but also with a baseline feeling of incredulity. “Who is this guy?” In the same way that Trump’s rants often give voice to his supporters’ grievances and fears, Democrats are now articulating the befuddlement and bemusement the rest of us have felt for years.
But the best thing about calling Trump weird is that it allows Democrats to pivot to a different message. They no longer have to respond to Trump’s central apocalyptic rhetorical premise and can focus on a more positive, substantive message, defined on their own terms. Let Trump’s running mate stay deep in the weeds, fighting a social media proxy war with Jennifer Aniston and Swifties.
I’m not a political scientist, I’m just a guy who was a teacher and has a little bit of background in rhetoric. I can tell you that the word weird has some powerful connotations. Nowadays we use it to mean bizarre, but historically we used the word to describe something supernatural or uncanny.
In this case, Harris, Walz, and the other Democrats are using the full power of all these meanings. Looking at Trump or Vance is like looking at a funhouse-mirror version of a New York celebrity mogul, or a Silicon Valley venture capitalist.
Describing someone as weird calls attention to their posturing and affectations that—when unnoticed—give them actual power. “Weird” takes the paper tiger, crumples it up and arcs it, across the classroom, and into the trash.
Then everyone, even the teacher, hoots and hollers for weird.
