US Democrats have spent recent days trying out a relatively new attack line on Donald Trump: that he is weird. The tactic is almost certainly calibrated to resonate with young and independent voters who, polls show, are moving from marked disinterest in the now-dropped matchup between Joe Biden and his presidential predecessor to engagement in the 100-day contest between Trump and Kamala Harris.
In a press release Thursday, vice-president and presumptive Democratic nominee Kamala Harris issued a list of the main takeaways of what Trump had given the American people. “Is Donald Trump OK?” the X message said. The seventh of nine entries was: “Trump is old and quite weird?”
At a fundraising event in Massachusetts on Saturday, Harris tried out the line again, describing what Trump and running mate JD Vance had been saying about her as “just plain weird”.
“I mean that’s the box you put that in,” Harris said after Trump had called her “a bum” the previous day and Vance disparaged her in 2021 as a “childless cat (lady)”.
Using hard language is seen by his supporters as an attack on them all and drives them into the defensive making Trump stronger. Calling him weird sidesteps that reaction and deflates Trump, especially if he launches a weird rambling speech as a response.
i see the point you’re trying to make… to think, all it took to beat trump this whole time was mollycoddling him and his followers…
like they’ve been doing for almost 10 years…
No, it’s making fun of him. The trick that always worked on him and nobody has been using lately is making fun of him. Do you remember how defensive he got about all the talk about him having “small hands”? That shit drove him nuts.
It turns out that the schoolyard name-calling tactics are very effective on him, but Democrats mostly feel they’re above that.
The previous approach was to focus on how he’s a dangerous fascist, which his supporters were able to spin as strength. Focusing on how he’s the kind of off-putting creep that you instinctively cover your drink as he walks by can’t be spun that way.
Buddy, they think literally everything is an attack on them.
Or have you not seen the article about Christians getting upset about the Olympics because some drag version of The Last Supper (only it was actually based on a Dutch painting portraying Bacchanalia, but that would take knowing more than 3 famous paintings, so forget it).
It’s time to stop making choices based on how this group of highly irrational people might react.
The hard core will never change their mind and be offended. The people that matter the most are the ones still capable of thinking by themselves, so I can understand not pushing them away.
And you have evidence that these people exist (in an amount that is not statistically insignificant)?