Hillary Clinton tried all sorts of acrimonious attacks against Donald Trump when the two were vying for the White House back in 2016.
Mr. Trump was a bad role model for children, she implied in one ad. He raised the spectre of nuclear war, she warned in another. He said disgusting things about women. Insulting things about veterans. Racist things about Black people. And he would destroy American democracy.
They were all variations on a theme – one that U.S. President Joe Biden’s team would resuscitate eight years later: Mr. Trump was a bad person, and his leadership posed an existential threat to America.
The message didn’t work for Ms. Clinton, though of course there were other factors at play during that election campaign. But efforts to revive it again, early in Mr. Biden’s campaign, came off as even more flaccid. For one, the messenger couldn’t sort the order of his words properly enough to tell people what they should be afraid of. But it also didn’t carry with it the same fear of the unknown as it had in 2016; American democracy lived through a Trump presidency, and it survived (worse for wear, but intact). There is a legitimate case to be made that a second Trump presidential term will be catastrophically worse, but convincing people of that, which requires they lend the messenger a certain degree of attention, patience and consideration, is a tough thing to do.
That’s one of the reasons why the Democrats’ new line of attack against Mr. Trump and his political cavalry is so effective: Everyone knows, innately, what “weird” looks and sounds like. It’s the Speaker of the House Mike Johnson saying that he and his son monitor each other’s porn usage. It’s Rudy Giuliani, then-attorney to Mr. Trump, holding a news conference about 2020 election fraud at a place called Four Seasons Total Landscaping, instead of the Four Seasons hotel. It’s Montana Republican Representative Matt Rosendale trying to roll back funding for in vitro fertilization because he sees it as “morally wrong.” It’s Mr. Trump’s pick for vice-president, J.D. Vance, joking about how Democrats would say drinking a Diet Mountain Dew is racist, and repeatedly ranting about “sociopathic” “childless cat ladies.”
Mr. Vance is the catalyst the Democrats needed to land their message. Mr. Trump has always been a deeply bizarre figure, to the point that most of us have become inured to his destructive eccentricities, but he is an authentic type of odd that he seems to come to genuinely. Mr. Vance, by comparison, is a clear phony, who flipped his views on Trumpism 180-degrees when he ran for the Ohio Senate. He has an arrogance that appears to compensate for a deep insecurity, which he deals with by telling a lot of lame jokes to try and impress his new friends. He’s uncomfortable to watch, awkward and insincere: a fresh-faced weirdo who reminds us that, hey, the rest of these guys are pretty weird, too.
The Republicans don’t own “weird,” of course. They have tried to flip the script on Democrats, pointing out, for example, how they will specify which pronouns they use upon introduction. The tactic might have worked if Republicans had pushed the weird message first, but they’re responding, defensive, and clearly feeling wounded. “Weird,” it seems, is working.
The reason why this line of attack is so effective against this crop of Republicans is not simply because it’s true (delegates at the Republican National Convention wore fake ear bandages in tribute to their leader, after all), and easy to understand, but because it’s diminishing. The Clinton and Biden messages were unintentionally positive; they implored Americans to fear Mr. Trump, a process that implicitly gave him some degree of credibility. To fear someone is to give them power over you, which is exactly the type of situation in which Mr. Trump thrives.
To call him “weird,” however, does the opposite. It’s belittling and deprecating, and not in the directly disparaging way that Ms. Clinton did by calling Mr. Trump’s supporters “deplorables,” but by making them into a little joke. That air of mirth robs Republicans of the opportunity to turn it into a rallying cry as they did with “deplorables,” and instead puts them on the defensive, trying to insist that, no, the other guys are the ones who are the weirdos.
For the Democrats, whose campaign got a clear boost of energy, enthusiasm and positivity when Kamala Harris replaced Mr. Biden on the ticket, the message has become an empowering one: We’re not scared of you, just a bit weirded out. And it’s left Republicans fuming, aghast that the people in Whoville are still singing despite all their efforts. When the Democrats were scared of them, Republicans retained a certain power. But now that they’re laughing at them, well, they’ve become a joke.