Suddenly, the Election Is About Weird vs. Normal

Existential dread isn’t saving democracy. Maybe making the campaign a referendum on weirdness will work.

Totally normal JD Vance. (Photo by Leon Neal/Getty Images)

DONALD TRUMP IS “old and quite weird.” He is “someone you wouldn’t want to sit near at a restaurant.” JD Vance is “a creep.” He would empower states to track women’s menstrual cycles and federal authorities to block them from crossing state lines for abortion care. This pair is bizarre. Just plain strange.

Behold the Harris for President campaign’s increasingly favored line of attack on the Republican ticket, an approach credited to both Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and Vice President Kamala Harris herself.

The Vance-is-a-creep email made me blink in surprise. But by the time the weird-guy-in-restaurant statement showed up a few hours later, with the word “strange” in the subject line, I laughed. Who wouldn’t relate to that? Could it be that Democrats are . . . onto something?

I’ve often joked and lamented in recent years about channeling the angst of Democrats and Never Trump Republicans, from anger and rage to despair and resolve. ‘Overwrought’ is probably the best way to describe the default state of millions of minds, including mine, for the past nine years.

My most angst-ridden moment during Trump’s first term came well before the January 6, 2021 Capitol riot that left five people dead and has led to nearly 1,500 arrests so far. It was in July 2020. The pandemic was going strong, I’d just had to cancel a second trip West to see my sons, and Trump, in an act of what Utah Sen. Mitt Romney called “historic corruption,” had just commuted his buddy Roger Stone’s sentence for seven felony convictions.

“Don’t let Donald Trump break us, America,” I wrote in the headline of a column—as much a warning for myself as for others. 

Joe Biden won in 2020 by channeling angst into a campaign to save the “soul of America” and protect its democracy. He was still doing it this year until he ended his 2024 bid, and he is still right—America remains at risk.

But high-minded defenses of our principles and elegant rhetorical phrases aren’t doing the job. Neither is existential dread. Trump shouldn’t have a chance in hell—and yet he does. It’s time to try something new. It’s time to be less lofty and more grounded in daily reality. It’s time to talk about the weirdness on “the other side,” as Walz said last week on MSNBC’s Morning Joe and other shows: “They want to take books away, they want to be in your exam room. . . . These are weird ideas.”

Weird and strange are descriptive words. They are not like the brutal taunts and name-calling Trump routinely lobs at people without giving his cruelty a second thought. The elevated language about the threat Trump poses to the American experiment is accurate. But the former president, a convicted felon who moved seamlessly and speedily last week from attacking “Crooked Joe” to attacking “Crooked Kamala,” doesn’t deserve it.

Trump especially doesn’t deserve it after picking Vance as his running mate. I mean, not even Trump has claimed, as Vance has, that the Democrats and the country are run by “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made” and want to make everyone else miserable, and so essentially “we’ve turned our country over to people who don’t really have a direct stake in it.”

Also, he said that all children should have a vote, with moms and dads controlling their ballots. When you go to the polls as a parent, he said in 2022, “you should have more power” than people who don’t have kids. For good measure, he accused Democrats of the “pernicious” and “evil” act of rejecting the American family, asserted (despite evidence to the contrary) that all rising Democratic leaders are childless, and said (without evidence) that “many of the most unhappy and most miserable and angry people in our media are childless adults.”

Was this guy even vetted? It’s not like this all happened in some previous century. The comments came in 2021 and 2022 talks with Tucker Carlson, Charlie Kirk, and students at the Intercollegiate Studies Institute. I don’t know what would be worse, that these red-flag remarks went undetected, or that the vetters noticed and said this is fine, or that they noticed and Trump knew, but his two older sons said JD was the only smart choice and he believed them.

And then when the comments resurfaced last week, the newly named vice presidential nominee chose to defend rather than defuse them; to insult people like Jennifer Aniston and Taylor Swift all over again in a conversation Friday with Megyn Kelly. And then on Sunday he “tripled down,” as the Harris campaign put it, in a “weird night” on Fox News.

Was Trump overconfident or inattentive in picking Vance? Either way, it was a mistake. In an echo of Sarah Palin 2008, he violated the “First, Do No Harm” rule of running mates. And the cost for him could be dire. Usually the worst outcome for losing candidates is they return to their regularly scheduled lives. For Trump, that life is an expensive tangle of indictments, trials, appeals, and maybe even prison.

The campaign will be dark and desperate as he seeks to avoid that fate. It already is. A second Trump presidency would also be dark and desperate, as he uses his powers, newly reinforced by the Supreme Court’s immunity-for-presidents ruling, to avoid consequences for him, his friends, relatives, allies, and cronies.

There are two potential upsides to this. One is this year’s uniquely abbreviated 100-day campaign. The other is the Vance effect. Reasonable people may well ask at this point: Did we not already have enough weirdness with Trump praising Hannibal Lecter and foreign dictators between boasts about overturning Roe v. Wade and monologues on whether he’d rather be electrocuted or eaten by a shark?

Trump obviously was counting on Vance to reinforce the MAGA brand and maximize MAGA turnout this fall. Instead he has doubled, tripled, and maybe even quadrupled the weirdness factor. The ticket is now so strange and out of the mainstream that maybe democracy can be saved after all.