Weird? As contemporary insults go, it feels fairly survivable. In fact, when compared with boomer, bigot, karen, gammon and hag – key concepts in much progressive civic discourse – weird is practically, in ascribing individuality to the targeted person, a compliment. Which when applied to a tech prodigy, weird usually is.
But vagueness about the exact offensiveness of weird is probably one reason this demi-slur is currently considered, by senior Democrats and a host of US commentators, to be the perfect, supremely effective response to the much cruder attacks on Kamala Harris now emanating from Donald Trump and his deputy. For years, Trump’s opponents considered restraint the dignified response to his ugliest invective. Today, when Trump/Vance go low, experimenting with the impact of, for instance, “she’s a bum”, “Crazy Kamala”, it is Democratic strategy smoothly to respond with, “just plain weird”, or variations like “old and quite weird”, “strange and old”. When Trump finally attempted an answer – “They’re the weird ones. Nobody’s ever called me weird” – rewarding clips of his difficulty were promptly and inevitably classified as “weird”.
One of the earliest outings for an attack line that was plainly impossible when the even older Joe Biden was acting strange came, shortly after his replacement with Harris, in response to Trump’s reference, for no remotely comprehensible reason, to Thomas Harris’s fictional serial killer. “Hannibal Lecter from ‘Silence of the Lamb’, [sic] is a lovely man.”
Trump’s been Lecter-obsessing for ages. But this time it prompted “Say it with me: weird” from the taunt’s original weaponiser, Minnesota governor, Tim Walz, followed, after this proved an online hit, by a sustained Democratic effort to associate every element and utterance of the Trump campaign with weirdness. Not weird as in exceptional or visionary, but to connote matters bizarre, peculiar, distasteful, tragic, pathetic, creepy, senior and essentially a bit worrying. The kind of reproach routinely aimed by eye-rolling young people at relations who’ve betrayed pitiful deficiencies regarding tech, taste or language. If that seems a mild characterisation of the international threat potentially represented by this dangerous megalomaniac and his sidekick, “weird” is said to have registered – hilariously when you consider what has previously bounced off – in terms of both public impact and pissing Republicans off.
By all means identify Trump as a felon – as a corrupt, authoritarian, sinister, lecherous, amoral, divisive, untrustworthy, cognitively struggling, nepotistic, anti-democratic, ignorant, gross ally of murderous dictators – but don’t call him weird. It’s mean. A piece in the LA Times was headlined: “With a single word – ‘weird’ – Democrats may have found Republicans’ kryptonite”.
The former presidential candidate, Vivek Ramaswamy, duly went on X last week to end the ridicule: “This whole ‘they’re weird’ argument from the Democrats is dumb & juvenile. This is a presidential election, not a high school prom queen contest.” There could hardly be, for the Democrats, more welcome confirmation that “weird” is deeply hurtful to the party that shares Trump’s reverence for civil campaigning: “Jeff Bozo”, “wacko”, “sleepy Joe”, “a real nut job”, “crooked Hillary”, “crazy”, “a jerk”, “a clown”, “psycho”, “Pocahontas”, “dopey”, “loser”, “sleazebag”.
It doesn’t help his case that Maga colleagues and allies remain disinclined to address the continual norm violations that make the weirdness project so immensely rewarding for Democrats. No need to raid the archives when, within one week, Trump offers, of Harris, “she became a Black person. I think someone should look into that”, and a Fox News host supplies, by way of a Harris deterrent, “when a man votes for a woman, he actually transitions into a woman”. To which Stephen King responded on X: “This is weird”.
The objection that it is culpably unserious may be less of a risk to this project than its assumption, reminiscent of Hillary Clinton’s “deplorables”, that significant numbers of people whose votes are vital to Harris will find Republican weirdness as hilarious as do X habitués, sympathetic media and supporters capable of defining “brat”. Sensitivities may be different in the US, but one lesson of Brexit was that waverers are unlikely to be attracted by purists characterising the opposite option as the preserve of, exclusively, jingoistic nutters. In fact, in another warning from history, recent UK preferences suggest some electorates may not just tolerate but inexplicably relish representation by people whose weirdness is documented, glaring, proudly off the scale.
Following Boris Johnson’s election, British governments became so overwhelmingly weird that, until two months ago, this virtually resembled a leadership qualification. His first appointment was Dominic Cummings, ostentatiously nonconformist, lionised in a BBC dramatisation, would-be recruiter of “weirdos and misfits”. Another Johnson hire was the celebrity Victorian Jacob Rees-Mogg, his apercus including: “Only liberals drink skimmed milk to go with their faux leather sandals.”
When Johnson was dumped, Tories picked, disregarding prosaic options, the no less strange Liz Truss, formerly best known for a curious speech about cheese. If her defeat looked like a setback for parliamentary weirdness, the deficit was promptly corrected by the election of Nigel Farage MP, Trump ally and a hero to people David Cameron described as “fruitcakes, loonies, and closet racists”.
Any Britons also enjoying the unusual experience of apparently normal leadership have an interest in the outcome of the Democrats’ weirdness messaging. Will it be good for dullness? Would it work on a Boris revival? Right up to Starmer’s victory his muted behaviour – or non-weirdness – was held against him, including by his colleagues. And even now some relics of Johnson’s party maintain – possibly with reason – that if they hadn’t dumped their useless but allegedly entertaining specialist in name-calling, public clowning, battle cries and incoherent speeches about cartoon characters, they would be in power.
The reason, experts always explained, that Johnson got away with disrespecting social norms (until he peaked everyone with lockdown breaking) was that its most repellent aspects were “priced in”. Is Trump any different? Whatever reaction is expected to the weirdness files, they hardly come as a shock.
• Catherine Bennett is an Observer columnist
