‘Weird’ Science

By Nick Catoggio

Wednesday, July 31, 2024

 

The most interesting thing about Kamala Harris’ nascent presidential campaign is the Trumpian tactical flourishes it’s displayed.

 

At her rally on Tuesday in Atlanta, Harris brought down the house when she looked into the camera and taunted Donald Trump with language that men typically use when challenging each other to fight. “If you’ve got something to say, say it to my face,” she chided him, daring him to debate. Impugning an opponent’s masculinity has been standard operating procedure in Republican presidential politics since 2015. It was arresting to see the tables turned by a progressive woman.

 

There’s something Trumpy about her campaign’s approach to border security, too. The Biden administration has handled that issue so abysmally, and Harris herself is so perilously exposed on it, that one would assume she and her team would opt to avoid it to whatever extent possible. Not so: One of her first ads goes directly at Trump on the subject, accusing him (correctly) of having sabotaged the bipartisan border bill that died in the Senate earlier this year. Border-state Sen. Mark Kelly has been dispatched to amplify the claim on cable news.

 

The idea that Kamala Harris, after three-and-a-half years of gross neglect, takes border enforcement more seriously than Donald “Mass Deportation” Trump is so preposterous that it can only be described as gaslighting. It’s a lie so shamelessly brazen that it seems designed to leave the audience questioning whether everything they thought they knew about reality is wrong.

 

That’s also been standard operating procedure in Republican politics since 2015.

 

The Trumpiest weapon in Harris’ arsenal, though, has been ridicule. It’s hard to think of an example over the last nine years in which an opponent has demeaned the Republican nominee more successfully than he’s demeaned them. Most rivals haven’t even bothered to try. Apart from Marco Rubio making jokes about “small hands” for two weeks during the 2016 primary, Trump’s opponents have attacked him as squishy, radical, sinister, uninformed—you name it—but rarely have they stooped to the sort of playground name-calling to which he regularly resorts.

 

Why would they? For the same reason that it’s foolish to wrestle with a pig, it’s foolish to engage Trump in a contest of ridicule. Rubio’s example is instructive: To this day, the nickname of “Little Marco” has stuck to him far more durably than his cracks about Trump being poorly endowed have stuck to the former president.

 

To my surprise, the Harris campaign and its allies have become the first opponents to successfully out-insult America’s most famous insult comic, however temporarily, by crowing about how “weird” he and his movement are. It’s gotten under Republicans’ skin, too, which is almost as surprising. Trump is routinely attacked by critics like me as a fascist, an ignoramus, and a sociopath, among other things, yet it all slides gently off of his and MAGA’s backs. Call them “weird,” though, and now you have their attention.

 

Why does this mild, innocuous jab bother them so much?

 

An unsettled party.

 

Partly it’s the hypocrisy. Republicans resent being attacked as abnormal by a party willing to defend any degree of progressive weirdness, and understandably so.

 

At the same time this week that the Harris campaign was busily mocking the right for being weird, it was hosting a virtual gathering called “White Dudes for Harris.” I find the nature of that event less offensive than some conservatives do because, for once, the left’s focus on racial identity wasn’t designed to pit Americans against one another. The Harris campaign believes (correctly, I think) that white men who are open to supporting her will face cultural pressure not to back a black woman. The “White Dudes” event was a way to encourage them by showing them that they’re represented, and valued, in her coalition.

 

But still: A campaign-sponsored political rally aimed specifically at whites is objectively weird. And it wasn’t the only one Team Harris hosted this week.

 

A second reason Republicans are irritated by the “weird” jabs is that they already felt irritable when the jabs began, and that too is understandable. Has a party ever endured a month in presidential campaigning as volatile as the one the GOP just suffered through?

 

It’s been 36 years since Republicans had an easy victory in a presidential election, but Joe Biden’s debate catastrophe on June 27 suddenly and sharply boosted the possibility of another. When Trump dodged a bullet on July 13 and reacted to being wounded with bravado, his supporters had good reason to assume that the contrast between his strength and the president’s enfeeblement had iced a comfortable victory.

 

Then, in a blink, it all fell apart.

 

Trump chose the untested, uncharismatic, fringy J.D. Vance as his running mate. Biden quit the race. Democrats rallied behind their lackluster VP with cash and enthusiasm that transformed her from a political punchline into a formidable opponent overnight. Damaging soundbites about Vance’s scorn for “childless cat ladies” emerged that left the Trump campaign struggling to respond. The polls tightened, throwing an election into doubt that was steaming toward a GOP landslide two weeks earlier.

 

The world had turned upside down, and Republicans were disoriented. And now, to add literal insult to injury, they’re being treated as the butt of a nationwide joke about “weirdness.” The popularity of the jab reflects how much they’ve lost control of the race and probably inflames their buyer’s remorse about Vance, who seems certain to do Trump more harm than good on the ticket. And, as I’ve explained, it places them in the alarming, unfamiliar position of seeing their hero effectively ridiculed for once instead of him doing the ridiculing.

 

The laws of political gravity have changed. Republicans are unsettled by it. Who can blame them?

 

I suspect the right also resents how useful the jabs about right-wing weirdos have been in unifying Democrats. After a month of bitter debate on the left about whether or not to dump Biden, the “weird” messaging has effectively refocused the party’s various constituencies on the common enemy. After all, jokes are inherently inclusive: To get the gag requires sharing the sensibility on which it’s based, and all Democrats find Trump and the right weird.

 

Jokes are also fun, a commodity that was already scarce and rapidly depleting among the left the clearer it became that Joe Biden wasn’t up to campaigning. Gleefully amplifying jabs at Republican weirdness (and crass smears of J.D. Vance in particular) is a sort of release valve for the explosion of enthusiasm the party felt upon Biden’s exit. They’re exuberant, they’re spoiling to go on offense, so naturally they’ve leaned into jokes.

 

All of this has unnerved Trump and the GOP so much that they’re still workshopping replies to accusations of weirdness more than a week later. Some, including Trump himself, have resorted to “I know you are but what am I” parries. Others have sought to turn “weird” into an insensitive slur at which Republicans should take grave offense. The unhappy truth, though, is that it’s hard to skillfully rebut an allegation of weirdness—especially when you are weird, as the gonzo right under Trump plainly is.

 

There are things one can say in response to more substantive political attacks, such as whether Trump truly is the greatest threat to democracy on the ballot this year. But what can you say to effectively vent your indignation at being called “weird”? Either you’ll end up seeming defensive, which has an unavoidable doth-protest-too-much quality to it, or you’ll end up seeming, well, weird.

 

In-groups and out-groups.

 

There’s a more ideological reason why Republicans resent the label, though. In a way, the whole point of Trumpy nationalism is to establish that the modern right isn’t weird.

 

“To Republicans, being called ‘weird’ is a bitter demonstration of their defeats in the culture wars of the 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s,” the economist Noah Smith wrote astutely on Wednesday. Nationalists believe that the identity-based tribes to which they belong should be preeminent in their nation’s politics and culture, and it’s the singular prerogative of those ruling tribes to declare what the rest of the nation regards as “weird” or not.

 

If American voters ratify Democrats’ judgment of Republican weirdness by electing Kamala Harris president, it will shatter the nationalist right’s belief in its preeminence. Instead of regaining its pride of place as a coalition of dominant tribes, as it once was and as it expects to be again under Trumpism, its new status as out-group will be affirmed. Calling it “weird” plays directly on that cultural insecurity. As Smith writes:

 

This inversion of ingroup and outgroup naturally dismays and rankles conservatives—especially educated ones who live in blue cities, but also those who are bombarded with liberal culture in TV, movies, and music all the time. Their everyday experience is as a counterculture and an outgroup, but they still have the cultural memory of when they were the “normal” majority. This manifests as a profound sense of loss and dispossession.

 

When Democrats like Kamala Harris call conservatives “weird”, I think it presses directly on this open wound. It’s a bitter reminder of the hegemony they’ve lost since 1990, and the exile in which they now wander. “Weird,” to conservatives, means “outgroup,” and that’s why they hate it so much.

 

Three days before Joe Biden quit the race, I wrote about how successful Trump’s supporters have been since 2015 in mainstreaming his brand of politics. “Through sheer determination,” I said, “the post-liberal right has moved the Overton window of what’s considered ‘normal’ in American politics.” That, in so many words, is why Democrats’ jabs about “weirdness” grate on Republicans. The left is trying to move that window back to where it was—or, perhaps, revealing that it hasn’t moved nearly as much as MAGA disciples would like to believe.

 

To a populist movement fervently convinced that it represents The People—so much so that it remains unable to accept the legitimacy of a national election it lost four years later—the out-group connotations of being called “weird” are intolerable. If a majority of voters agree with a black woman from San Francisco that the party of “real America” is weird, what’s left of America or real Americans’ place in it?

 

That might explain why calling their candidate a fascist or a threat to democracy doesn’t offend them as much as being called “weird” does. (Which is itself plenty weird.) To them, an authoritarian country ruled by the right is still recognizably “real America.” A classically liberal country in which the right is perceived as a weird out-group is not.

 

Even within the right, accusations of “weirdness” risk causing tensions between different factions. I wrote about one on Monday: The libertine “Barstool conservatives” in Trump’s coalition have little use for the nationalists in Vance’s niche who want to tax childless people to subsidize families. No doubt many of them agree with Democrats that Vance is “weird.” The same goes for traditional conservatives who watched the most popular “America First” broadcaster in the country marvel at coin-operated locks on the carts in a Russian supermarket a few months ago. Tucker Carlson isn’t just repulsive. He’s weird.

 

And the more you’re reminded of how weird your allies in a political party are, the more you might reasonably question your place in it.

 

The elevation of Vance to the national ticket is itself evidence of weirdness at the highest ranks of the GOP. To all appearances, the Trump campaign was caught flat-footed by the old footage of him ranting about “childless cat ladies,” which is unfathomable in an era in which vice presidential nominees are typically vetted to within an inch of their lives. Did Trump’s advisers somehow miss his comments—or are they so “weird” and out of touch with normal voters themselves that they uncovered the comments but couldn’t perceive anything inflammatory about them?

 

Or, third option: Did they uncover the comments, raise a red flag with the campaign, and get overruled by super-weirdos like Don Jr. and Tucker who wanted a fellow weirdo like Vance on the ticket for ideological reasons, no matter how many votes it cost?

 

The story of the Republican Party in 2024 is itself one of in-groups and out-groups. Populists are the in-group, the ruling faction, and their highest political priority is maintaining that status. Other Republicans, whose highest political priority is nominating electable candidates and defeating the Democrats, have become an out-group. The more keenly aware the out-group is of the in-group’s self-sabotaging weirdness, the greater the risk of a party split. Go figure that, for populists, Trump being called “weird” might touch a nerve.

 

Back to normal.

 

There’s one other thing the new message about weirdness does for Democrats. It positions them as a more moderate party by lowering the rhetorical stakes.

 

Which seems counterintuitive, no? Everyone from Joe Biden to yours truly has spent the last few years warning that Trump will threaten the constitutional order in a second term. If retaining classical liberalism as the paradigm for American government depends on the result in November, the last thing Kamala Harris should be doing is downplaying the risk.

 

But that’s what Democrats are doing by trading the warnings about democracy for goofs on how “weird” the GOP is. And maybe there’s something to it.

 

“Bashing Trump for being ‘weird’ instead of for being a fascist dictator suggests that Democrats want to return to a more normal, staid sort of politics,” Smith wrote in his new essay, impressed by the strategy. “‘Weird’ just isn’t something you call your evil overlord, which suggests that Democrats are slowly walking away from the notion that they are an oppressed people ruled by evil overlords.”

 

Harris and her party understandably believe that they can seize the center from an unstable coup-plotting felon, but not every approach to centrist voters will work. Biden’s “democracy is on the ballot” pitch produced a race in which he trailed reliably for months and had begun to collapse after his debate performance. Voters in the middle will not, it seems, be frightened into voting against Donald Trump even though they have every logical reason to fear his victory.

 

So Harris is trying something different. Instead of scaring them, she’s going to try to relate to them.

 

That means flip-flopping egregiously toward the center on policy, starting with her gaslighting about border enforcement. But it also means evincing a more moderate sensibility about politics than progressive radicals, presenting herself as a normal-ish leader in an era when such creatures are endangered and seemingly headed for extinction. “Republicans are weird” is part of that effort to seize that mantle of normalcy. And it might be working: For the first time this year, Kamala Harris’ net favorability is better than Donald Trump’s.

 

I’m skeptical that a country that elected a colossal weirdo in 2016 and is seriously thinking of electing him again in 2024 will awaken to his off-putting weirdness if only they’re reminded often enough of it. But there are worse strategies for Democrats than trying to make the race a referendum for swing voters on who’s “weirder” when their opponent is as weird as this, and will only get worse before Election Day.