WASHINGTON: "Weird.” Democrats want this to be the word of 2024 - their secret weapon to bring down Donald Trump. "Trump is old and quite weird?” as a Kamala Harris campaign statement put it. "Just plain weird,” Harris said. Trump has built a political career on mocking everyone from opponents to his own staffers. But being the butt of the joke makes him furious. "I hate when people laugh at me,” he told a rally earlier this month. That "weird” jibe is Harris’s bid, in her come-from-behind campaign, to get the whole country laughing.
Where President Joe Biden used formal - often grandiose - speeches to frame Trump as an existential boogeyman, Harris’s team is trying to shrink the Republican into something more like an unpleasant clown. Here are typical phrases from Harris campaign releases on Trump: "Bitter, unhinged.” "Rambled about golf.”
"Generally sounded like someone you wouldn’t want to sit near at a restaurant - let alone be president of the United States.” And when it comes to Trump’s vice-presidential pick, JD Vance, the mockery is if anything more intense. Vance’s past comments belittling "childless cat ladies” - women who, like Harris, have not given birth - raise him to the "super weird” category, according to two Democratic senators. And a viral piece of online trolling - a fake story claiming that Vance wrote about sex acts with a sofa - demonstrates the extent to which the anti-Trump camp is ready to weaponize humor.
The story may have been made up, but an industrial flow of memes involving Vance, couches and suggestions of what might be happening between them did the damage. "JD Vance didn’t have sex with a couch. But he’s still extremely weird,” began an article on the online news site Vox. Or as Hillary Clinton put it: "If Republican leaders don’t enjoy being called weird, creepy, and controlling, they could try not being weird, creepy, and controlling.”
The Trump campaign was blindsided by Biden’s abrupt decision to drop out, then Harris’s warp-speed start, which in one week has seen her ignite the Democratic base and pull level with Trump - or even ahead - in the polls. "A sucker punch,” Vance said in a recording of an address to supporters obtained by The Washington Post.
The shift in tone from Biden’s policy-heavy sermons about democracy to the edgier Harris approach is no less startling. Now Republicans are looking to turn the joke back on their opponents. Trump is doing what he’s always done - dishing out the insults and trying to find one that sticks. He’s called her "dumb,” "nuts” and a "bum.” And Trump’s combative son, Don Jr, is leading a drive to flip the "weird” jibe on its head. "What a ... weirdo,” he posted on X, using a common vulgarity, over a video clip of Harris saying she supports access to gender reassignment surgery for prison inmates. "Talk about weird priorities,” he wrote in another post about her transgender support. — AFP