The short, strange life of ‘weird’

THE SHORT, STRANGE LIFE OF "WEIRD." For a brief moment, every Democratic talker in the United States was calling former President Donald Trump and running mate Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) "weird." They're still doing it now, but in the last 24 hours or so, the vogue of "weird" appears to be dwindling. And that leaves the question: What was that about?

Several press accounts suggest it got started last week when Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN), who just happens to be on presumptive nominee Vice President Kamala Harris's short list for running mate, "called Trump and Vance 'just weird' in an MSNBC interview, which the Democratic Governors Association, of which Walz is chair, amplified in a post on X," according to ABC News .

Then the Harris campaign, just days in existence, began calling Trump and Vance "weird" on every occasion it could. Last Friday, the campaign sent out a press release headlined "JD Vance Is a Creep (Who Wants to Ban Abortion Nationwide)." The first sentence of the release: "JD Vance is weird."

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By the weekend, shows on MSNBC and CNN were talking about it, giving Walz credit. The head of the Democratic National Committee predicted victory in November in part because its Republican opponents are "weirdos." Later, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D-MI), who pulled herself out of the vice presidential pool, claimed the "weird" talking point was breaking through because of the Republican agenda and "the way they address people, it is bizarre. It's weird. It is weird. ... And weird is a kind of a funny phrase to use because it's bizarre."

By then , it seemed that every Democratic official and every Democratic ally in the press was calling the Trump-Vance ticket "weird." Look at this collection of clips to see one after the other after the other after the other.

Does it work? Who knows? The Democrats speaking in unison obviously believe it does. But here's one very odd thing about it: President Joe Biden, who was the 2024 Democratic candidate until he was deposed by a group of party insiders, based his campaign on the threat he claimed former President Donald Trump posed to democracy. Say what you will about it — and it was basically malarkey, as the president might say — it was serious malarkey. It was a big, deeply solemn accusation.

And now? Oooh, they're weird. As a whole, on cue, the Democratic Party changed the focus of the campaign from saving democracy to saying the other side has cooties. That was an extraordinary decision, to say the least.

A few days ago, Politico suggested that Democrats may have de-emphasized democracy in favor of "weird" because democracy just wasn't selling. Biden, Politico reported, "believed deeply in making the issue of democracy a central theme of the campaign. But the president's remarks on the subject often featured a grave tone and a heaviness that, more than three years after the January 6, 2021 insurrection, the country had seemingly tuned out. Polls showed voters rated Biden and Trump roughly evenly on questions of which candidate would be better to protect democracy.”

That is a big, serious question. With Biden's charge in mind, voters could see the sitting president advocate removing Supreme Court justices because he did not like their decisions; they could see his Justice Department indicting his opponent not once but twice; they could see Biden's supporters trying to remove Trump from presidential ballots — they could see all of that and reasonably wonder which candidate would better protect democracy. No wonder people got a little tired of things. So the Harris team thought it might be better to just dump the big, serious Biden campaign theme in favor of ... "weird."

There are those who argue that "weird" itself is a serious message. The Atlantic's David Frum suggested that it was a shrewd campaign appeal directed at millions of women, who will get the anti-Trump, pro-Harris message even if Trump supporters don't. "'Weird' is code for 'expresses obsessive hostility to women, including the women in his own personal life,'" Frum wrote , "and because MAGA Republicans don't get the code, they don't understand why they are losing the argument.”

Maybe. A huge gender gap has characterized this entire campaign, with Trump having a big lead among men and Biden having a big lead among women. Through the ouster of Biden, Trump's lead was a bit bigger than Biden's, meaning Trump led in polls both nationwide and in key swing states. Maybe "weird" will be the magic word that turns any women who do not already support Trump against the former president. Or maybe not.

In any event, now, although it's never a good idea to speak too soon, it appears the "weird" wave might have crested. Some Trump supporters started posting images of the Biden administration's celebration of transgenderism, men dressed in women's clothing reveling on the White House lawn, alongside photos of Vance and his family with the caption "JD Vance is weird." That led to other sorts of pushback on the "weird" theme. And then the Harris campaign released its first big ad, and it was an entirely conventional case for her candidacy — no "weird," no memes, just a straight old-fashioned campaign commercial. And now "weird" doesn't seem to be popping up every second on some media outlets and in social media. So maybe we are approaching the point where it all seems overdone. And then, voters can hope, the campaign can move on to being a campaign.