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 other direct attacks have substance. But calling Trump the weird guy and not saying why he’s weird takes away all the instant counters. And when he throws a tantrum like a toddler because of this, you can damn well keep calling him weird.
Normally I wouldn’t love indulging in ad hominem attacks, but he’s built an entire political strategy around them, and this I think hits that sweet spot where it’s adopting the technique, including the impossibility of logically refuting it, without stooping to the same level of pure meanness and implicit sanctioning of violence.
“If they go low, we dip down just a little bit to tell them how creepy that is.”
