In 2016, Democrats taunted Donald Trump as “dangerous Donald.” In 2020, they moved on from dangerous to say that Trump’s Republican Party was a threat to the “soul of America.” Both messages — one relatively successful, one much less so — emphasized the threat that Trump posed to America and the world.
This year, as it mounts its third national campaign against Trump and his MAGA acolytes, the Democratic Party has abandoned the language of peril and danger in favor of something that is a little less heated.
Trump and JD Vance, Kamala Harris and her allies say, are “weird.”
It started with Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, now Harris’s running mate. Making the case against Trump and the Republican ticket in an interview on MSNBC, an almost bemused Walz said that the Republican Party was so outside the mainstream that it was off-putting to most Americans: “These are weird people on the other side. They want to take books away. They want to be in your exam room.”
Democrats immediately embraced Walz’s characterization of the former president and his running mate. Pete Buttigieg, the secretary of transportation, said Trump was getting “older and stranger.” Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania called Trump “weird” at a rally for Harris, as did Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, who also said that Vance was “erratic.”
“Weird” doesn’t sound like much. But of all the attacks Democrats have levied against Republicans since Trump came down that escalator, this one appears to hit the hardest. Republican politicians seem taken aback by the idea that they’re outside the mainstream, by the charge that their interests and priorities are alienating to the average American.
Now, stepping back a bit, they shouldn’t be. The signature obsessions of Republican politics since 2020 — election denialism, book banning, abortion bans and the crusades against trans and other gender non-conforming people — are either unpopular with most Americans or electoral dead weight. Democrats in local, state and federal elections have scored win after win in opposition to these and similar preoccupations. In fact, if not for its commitment to this divisive, far-right cultural agenda, the Republican Party might have gotten the “red wave” of its dreams in the 2022 midterm elections.
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