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 contexts are really different. Boris played up his “harmless eccentric” facade, but Trump isn’t going to benefit from looking whimsical or whatever, no one would buy that from him. No one sees him as some mad genius.
Reality is people are pretty tired of weird in their politics, which is why in this context I think it’s potentially a good approach.
My sense of the general sentiment is that people don’t have time for weirdos at this point, we’ve had 8 years of weird and now we’ve got real problems facing the nation and the world and can’t be mucking around with a bunch of troglodytes like Vance who think only married people who own property should be citizens or whatever bizzarre Gilead type ideas conservatives have for the country.