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In case you hadn’t noticed, over the course of the first week of the Kamala Harris presidential campaign, when it was hard to know what was real or what was happening, “weird” suddenly became a central part of the story. If this hasn’t locked on your radar yet, this is the gist: It’s hard to know precisely where it started, but Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota has gotten the most attention for pushing and then amplifying it. Quite simply, he said, guys like Trump and Vance are just “weird.” And along with the dominating freight train of Kamala Week One, that message, that identification, seemed to connect in ways that “authoritarian” and “extremist” and “threat to democracy” never quite did. JD Vance is a big supporter of “menstrual surveillance,” he’s got this weird snarling anger at women with no children. It may be bad and wrong, but everyone gets that its just … well, weird.
And look, JD Vance is super weird. But what’s been most interesting to me is that over the last handful of days I’ve had several friends reach out to me and ask, “Where are you on ‘weird’?”
They don’t feel the need for any additional explanation. And they’re right.
It’s important to note that the toplines of the current polls are pretty close to where they were on the eve of the late June debate. But there’s no question there’s a rush of momentum in Harris’s favor and that the Trump campaign has been knocked on its heels in a way we haven’t seen in years. “Weird” is clearly part of that mix. And even beyond that, people are looking for an explanation of the vast momentum shift. People are simultaneously surprised, heartened and yet unsure whether “weird” is somehow juvenile, unserious, maybe letting MAGA off the hook for being dangerous and extremist. They feel that it might be like taking Ozempic when they should really just be hitting the gym.
I don’t remember getting the same question the same way in such rapid succession from the same number of people at any time in recent memory. So I figure people are thinking about this.
The short version is I’m 100% behind weird.
There are three general thoughts I have on why it’s nothing but good, but, before getting to that, let me say that part of the reason I like it is to me it’s very TPMy — direct, punchy, vernacular. Because … look, they’re weird. Politics is serious business. But that doesn’t mean it can’t be enjoyable, fun. You don’t have to act serious to be serious about politics.
The power of “weird” is that it clusters together all of the things Democrats care about and want to prevent under the vast degenerate banner of Trumpism in a language that is intuitively understandable. People hear it and without having to recall or analyze the full menagerie of the Trumpian freakshow say, “Yeah … you’re right. Just weird.”
It also communicates something that is far more than the sum of its parts. These guys have weird, creepy obsessions. They say off-putting, menacing things. They speak in an insiders code that feels like you’re talking to some ’80s teenagers who’ve gone off the deep end into D&D. But they’re not just hanging around in their basement. They want to be in your bathroom. You wouldn’t feel comfortable being around them in person. You have an intuitive feeling there’s something not quite right about them. And that is as good a reason as any not to give them any power over your life. It’s a language, a vessel into which all the particulars can be poured, one in which they all suddenly make sense.
Does “weird” crowd out “democracy,” “abortion” and everything else? Why would it? No campaign is just one thing. The canonical rock band ensemble has one or two guitars, a bass guitar, a lead singer and drums. They’re each doing different things. If you isolate what the bass and guitar are doing it can be difficult to tell sometimes how the two things even relate to each other. But with a good song and a good performance it works. A campaign isn’t a monologue. It’s not one thing. It’s a bunch of things happening at once, with different entry points for different kinds of people and different depths people can venture into depending on their level of engagement.
But isn’t “weird” just making fun of people? Well … yes. And that’s good. It’s good to mock and make fun of people who are bad or want to do bad things. It’s also necessary politically. One of the challenges of the Trump era is that Trumpism is very threatening and dangerous. It aims to upend and destroy the foundations of our civic democracy. But in cataloguing these threats and pumping up outrage over every Trumpian transgression we can also build up the image of their power like inflating a vast flaccid balloon, a sort of collective psyching yourself out. Good thrusting mockery cuts right through that. Yes, they’re dangerous. But they’re also insecure, stunted degenerates. They’re weird. Normal people don’t want to be around them. They think this kind of talk is normal because it’s common parlance in the far-right podcast subculture they live in. That’s really the JD Vance story right there. In his world, raging at miserable cat ladies trying to rule our lives doesn’t seem strange.
An election campaign isn’t a seminar. It’s not an argument or a logical proof. It’s a battle to get the most votes and acquire political power. What pushes those fights forward, far more than many Democrats understand, are image-moments of performative power — acting and making your opponent react, knocking opponents back on their heels with attacks they can’t manage to respond to. Walzian weird has allowed Democrats, at least over the last week, to step right around MAGA’s perpetual spray of deflectionary nonsense, and say who these guys are. The best they’ve been able to manage in response is to go on Twitter posting pictures of Democrats standing next to trans people and say, “NO YOU’RE WEIRD!!!!” in a kind of huffy, vein-popping and desperate way. Performances of dominance are always central to a political campaign, and more so in a presidential campaign than any other. Donald Trump’s understanding of this has always been the root of his electoral power.
So “weird” is great. It’s connecting for people who don’t think in formal, ideological terms, which is to say the vast majority of voters. It’s judgy in a good way but also offhanded in a way that is light on the tongue and expresses not a florid indictment but a breezey rejection. Just no time for it. It’s knocking Trump world on its heels and leaving them at a loss for how to respond. There’s nothing special about “weird.” But it’s an example of forceful attacking language that connects and that’s something that Democrats need a lot more of.