The wisdom in calling Donald Trump weird
The bickering among Democrats and Republicans over which party’s nominee is weirder is among the more hopeful developments of this presidential campaign. It implicitly brings to the forefront of politics the question: what is normal? President Joe Biden’s bid to be re-elected at the age of 81 was obviously not that. Voters knew it all along, even as Democratic leaders, while secretly sharing the opinion, laboured to insist otherwise. The exultation within the party over what should be quite normal—having a candidate who campaigns vigorously, speaks clearly and laughs easily—is an index of how strange Mr Biden’s wan, creaky candidacy had become.
Mr Biden’s abdication cleared the way for Vice-President Kamala Harris to focus attention on the abnormality of the Republican nominee, Donald Trump. Rather than stick with Mr Biden’s sombre approach, warning of a menace to America’s soul, she and her allies began needling Mr Trump. Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota and now Ms Harris’s running-mate, started calling him “weird”, and as she and other Democrats joined in, the former president foolishly took the bait.
Mr Trump might instead have chosen to wear the adjective as a badge of honour. He has pulled off that trick with more daunting challenges, such as having his mugshot taken or being convicted of felonies. By comparison, interpreting the word “weird” to suit his politics seems simple. Being “weird”, in the sense of not following the herd, is a good thing, and Mr Trump’s message from the beginning has been that he is not a conventional politician. Of course he would seem weird to the swamp creatures. The T-shirts practically write themselves.
But it is conceivable that being called “weird”, with its whiff of high-school stigma, of relegation to a low-status social group, pokes some particular sore spot deep inside the Republican nominee. In any event Mr Trump’s I’m-rubber-you’re-glue reflex is to bounce any insult back to its source, from Hillary Clinton’s claim he was a Russian puppet (“No puppet—you’re the puppet”) to Mr Biden’s warning that Mr Trump was a threat to democracy (“I’m the opposite. They’re the threat to democracy.”) Hence: “They’re the weird ones. Nobody’s ever called me weird.”
This time he has a point: Democrats have traditionally been the weird ones, particularly Democrats from California. The last serious Democrat to run for president from California was Jerry Brown, known, because of his mix of idealism and eccentricity, as “Governor Moonbeam”. Ms Harris’s move to seize the high, if flat, ground of normalcy—think football pitch in midwestern suburb—is a clever act of pre-emption. It has been accompanied by reversals that suggest she thinks Democratic politics, including her own, recently got pretty weird in a bad way.
Ms Harris has clarified that she no longer wants to ban fracking or create a federal jobs guarantee. She also opposes a single-payer health-care system and forcing gun owners to sell their assault weapons to the government. She has begun boasting about her years fighting crime and trying to strengthen the border. She is disappointing leftists by calling for the restoration of the protections of Roe v Wade, which established a right to abortion until the fetus was viable, rather than a more expansive guarantee.
She is also presenting herself as an optimistic fighter for the future and warning that “Donald Trump wants to take our country backward.” That wish may not seem as weird as hoping to disguise the death of a bear cub as a bicycle accident in Central Park, as Robert F. Kennedy junior, an independent candidate, says he did. But it is an axiom of American politics that elections are about the future, and Mr Trump often seems obsessed with the past.
How serious Ms Harris is about repositioning the party, and whether voters will buy it, are open questions. Her choice of Mr Walz shows she is trying to walk a line between antagonising the left and appealing to moderates. A veteran, former geography teacher and hunter with a zest for dad jokes, Mr Walz radiates normal-guy vibes. But he is to the left of other candidates Ms Harris considered. For now, polls show many independent voters do not know much about Ms Harris, which gives her a chance to establish herself as normal. Mr Trump sees the challenge. As he put it at a rally on August 3rd, “We have to work hard to define her.” He has chosen to do that not just by emphasising her former positions but by mocking her identity and intelligence.
Going for gold
Mr Trump is falling back on the politics that helped him in 2016 to carve a path to victory in the electoral college through states such as Pennsylvania, turning out alienated white men who do not usually vote. The approach reflects his long-held view of the motivating power of racism. Back in the 1990s (as Maggie Haberman reported in her biography of Mr Trump, “Confidence Man”), a consultant showed Mr Trump a projection that non-whites would eventually constitute the American majority. Mr Trump replied that would never happen, because a revolution would prevent it. “This isn’t going to become South Africa,” he said.
Are such views normal? Even some on the left nowadays treat racism as a barrier Americans cannot surmount. Yet while Ms Harris’s candidacy was coming into focus, Americans were cheering their Olympic team as it presented a daily display of diversity, teamwork, excellence and patriotism. Attitudes change. In 1958 just 4% of Americans approved of marriage between people of different races, according to the Gallup polling group; by 2021 that proportion was 94%, a change the organisation hailed as “one of the largest transformations in public opinion in Gallup’s history”. The arc of history may not inevitably bend towards justice, but in America it is weird to argue otherwise. ■
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