Why 'You're Being Weird' Works So Well

The Republican Party stopped trying to appeal to normies a long time ago.

JD Vance is a weird dude. He wants to end no-fault divorce and thinks childless adults shouldn’t get as many votes as parents. His favorite “philosopher” is a neo-monarchist who misses slavery. The guy talks like a second-rate alt-right edgelord, a sort of generic-brand-Ben-Shapiro.

That’s not surprising. Vance was a complete political unknown in 2016. He is the type of guy who figured out how to flourish in the Republican Party as it exists today. Systematically, the current iteration of Republican political leadership selects for strange creeps. This is a party that has embraced QAnon and January 6th conspiracy theories. It is a party that fervently believes in whatever Donald Trump just came up with today. The party has spent eight years winnowing down its leadership, removing all of the old-school characters who might object to Trump’s most absurd antics. What’s left is a whole lot of people talking and acting in a JD Vancelike manner.

Did you notice who wasn’t at the RNC? No George W. Bush or Mitt Romney or Paul Ryan or Mike Pence. The DNC next month will likely have primetime speeches by two former Presidents (Clinton, Obama), the sitting president, the nominee, and the VP nominee. The RNC had primetime speeches by JD Vance, Eric Trump, Donald Trump Jr., all organized by Lara Trump. The party barely has leaders that aren’t blood relations anymore.

So the Harris for President campaign has turned this into an attack line. And it’s… kind of perfect. I figured they would be good, but, I mean, I didn’t expect them to be this good this early.

Check out this example below: “Trump is old and quite weird?”

How are they landing absolute body blows in bullet point seven of a press release? Who does that?!?

The Harris campaign is having fun, and the whole Democratic Party network is getting in on the phone. And, oh yeah, Republican elites are absolutely losing it in response.

It’s a sign of just how far the Republican Party has drifted. This line wouldn’t have worked in the Reagan years or the Bush years. The Democrats are now the party of Taylor Swift and the NFL and Bud Light. The Republicans are the party of getting banned from national touring productions of Beetlejuice: The Musical.*

The Democrats, in other words, are the party of normal people. Normal people don’t sack the capitol because their preferred candidate lost an election. Normal people go to their kids’ soccer games or to, y’know, brunch.

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Not everyone is a fan of this new attack line. Tom Friedman thinks it is a mistake. In his latest New York Times column, Friedman warns “Democrats Could Regret Calling Trump and His Supporters ‘Weird.” He says its “the dumbest message Democrats could seize on right now” because it risks “humiliating” white, working-class, non-college-educated men and women.

It seems like Friedman is conflating Kamala Harris’s “Trump is weird” with Hillary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” comment during the 2016 election. But that just shows that he hasn’t thought enough about the contours of the 2024 race.

Hillary Clinton’s comment was directed at nameless, faceless members of the Republican electorate. She was (accurately) describing the behaviors of the alt-right in general. The alt-right seized on the line, stripped it of all context, and turned it into a badge of honor. They responded with mock outrage, and major media outlets started clutching their pearls. The whole episode was treated through a frame of “is Clinton out of touch/is she too mean to segments of the American public?” It didn’t play well, and left Clinton on the defensive.

The most obvious difference here is that the Harris campaign is focusing on the words and actions of specific Republican leaders, not generic Republican voters. Watch this Harris campaign rally clip: “and by the way, don’t you find some of their stuff to just be plain weird?”

The substance of Project 2025 and Trump’s campaign rally fodder is anti-democratic and dangerous. The Biden campaign was trying to focus public attention on the substance Trump’s agenda, but their comms couldn’t break through because “Biden old.” The Harris campaign is adding some mirth and verve by additionally pointing out that these proposals are just very, very weird. Republican leaders have lost the ability to sound like normal people. All of the Republicans who were capable of sounding normal were purged from the party leadership.

That’s the other difference between 2024 and 2016: It has been eight, long years of bending the party to Trump’s will. All the people who could pass as a normie are long gone. The conservative party no longer sounds the way mass-appealing conservatives are supposed to sound.

The introductory-textbook version of conservatism is that it is an ideology for people who defend the status quo ante. William F. Buckley once described conservatives as people who “stand athwart history, yelling Stop.” The classic image it conjures is one of generational conflict — the old normies, frustrated by the new norms introduced by kids-these-days.

That was never actually an accurate description of the conservative movement. (Read Rick Perlstein, please!) But it was close enough for campaign comms. You couldn’t pin “weird” on the Dole/Kemp ticket in 1996 or the Bush/Cheney ticket in ‘00 or ‘04. (Hell, Jack Kemp was a former NFL quarterback!) You could kind of pin it on Mitt Romney in 2012, but mostly because the guy had been way-too-rich for way-too-long. But the rhetorical strength of the Republican Party of old was that they were anchored in traditionalism.

Trump in 2016 seemed like an anomaly. The Republican Party leadership didn’t know what to do with him. Then they started to fall in line. And the ones who got out of line were exiled. The Party doesn’t sound like traditionalists anymore, because traditionalism doesn’t play well on Alex Jones or Hannity or Newsmax or Breitbart or the Daily Wire.

Democracy isn’t entirely a popularity contest. But it is by definition at least a LITTLE BIT a popularity contest. And after eight years of Trumpism, the Republican Party is run by heavy-breathing creeps who insist that men should control women’s bodies and the Deep State is turning all the children trans. They aren’t the party of straight-laced quarterbacks and veterans and businessmen anymore. They’re a party of Steve Miller and Steve Bannon — total losers hellbent on vengeance fantasies.

That’s fundamentally why “Trump/Vance/senior Republican surrogates are being weird” leaves a mark. The Republican party has spent eight years grinding all the traditional-sounding conservatives to dust. They’re talking openly about ending elections and mass deportation waves and anointing (their) Presidents as kings.

The substance is serious and dangerous. But the style is also bizarre and off-putting. (As in, holy hell Donald you have lost the plot. Why are you talking about Hannibal Lecter?!?) They aren’t invoking a return to some cherished American status quo ante. They are dreaming up pretend versions of the 1950s (or, in their less-guarded moments, the late 1930s in specific parts of Europe).

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Calling it “weird” is cathartic, because taking it seriously is so exhausting. These are dangerous people, but they are barely serious people!

The Republican Party has spent years selecting for creepy edgelords. You don’t have to solely adopt the serious tone of “their proposals are dangerous!” You can also heckle them for sounding like strange freaks with offputting power fantasies.

And, even better, calling it weird hits a sore spot. The best communication strategies put your opponents off-balance and lead them to make mistakes.

I don’t expect this will be the central message of the campaign. (“We won’t go back” is more potent and inspiring.) But I also don’t think it will peter out anytime soon. After eight years of not calling the Republican leadership a bunch of creeps, there is a metric ton of material to work through here. The Republican counternarrative is going to be ripe for ridicule, and these are not people who respond to teasing with poise or equanimity.

JD Vance is a weird dude. Donald Trump is a felon and an authoritarian demagogue and a Presidential failure. He’s also a strange fabulist, entirely detached from reality. Their advisors and lieutenants aren’t much better. They have gotten used to delivering strange diatribes to the conservative fanbase that are then politely sanitized by the mainstream news coverage. They have said a lot of things, none of them normal.

And now the Democrats are pointing it out. It’s a strong message specifically because of how long it has been since Republican leaders felt constrained by any expectation of normalcy.

*Correction: A previous version of this newsletter referred to the Denver production of Beetlejuice: The Musical as a “regional theater production.” Representative Lauren Boebert was, in fact, removed from a national touring production of Beetlejuice: The Musical for getting extremely handsy with her date. I regret the error.