WASHINGTON: “Strange.” Democrats want it to be the word of 2024 — their secret weapon to take down Donald Trump.
“Trump is old and pretty weird?” as Kamala Harris’s campaign statement put it.
“Just weird,” Harris said.
Trump has built a political career on ridiculing everyone from opponents to his own staff.
But being the target of a joke infuriates him.
“I hate it when people laugh at me,” he told a rally earlier this month.
The “weird” taunt is Harris’ attempt to make the country laugh in his “comde-from-back” campaign.
Where President Joe Biden used formal — often grandiose — speeches to paint Trump as an existential bogeyman, Harris’ team is trying to reduce the Republican to something more like an unpleasant clown.
Here are typical phrases from Harris’ campaigns about Trump:
-“Bitter, unhed.”
-“He raved about golf.”
And when it comes to Trump’s choice for vice president, J.D. Vance, the mockery is perhaps even more intense.
According to two Democratic senators, Vance’s past comments disparaging “childless cat ladies” — women who, like Harris, have not given birth — elevate him to the category of “super weird.”
And a viral piece of online trolling — a fake story claiming Vance wrote about having sex with a couch — shows the extent to which the anti-Trump camp is willing to use humor as a weapon.
The story may have been made up, but the industrial flow of memes involving Vance, sofas, and suggestions of what might happen between them did the damage.
“J.D. Vance didn’t have sex with the couch. But he’s still extremely weird,” began the article on the online news website Vox.
Or as Hillary Clinton said, “If Republican leaders don’t like to say they’re weird, creepy, and controlling, they might as well try not to be weird, creepy, and controlling.”
Trump’s campaign was blindsided by Biden’s sudden decision to step down, and then by Harris, who started at warp speed, galvanizing the Democratic base in the space of a week to level with — or even ahead of — Trump in the polls.
“Sucker punch,” Vance said in a recording of the speech to supporters obtained by The Washington Post.
The shift in tone from Biden’s political sermons on democracy to Harris’ more edgy approach is no less surprising.
Now Republicans are trying to turn the joke back on their opponents.
Trump is doing what he’s always done – dishing out insults and trying to find one that lasts. She’s called “stupid,” “stupid” and “bum.”
And Trump’s embattled son, Don Jr., is leading the effort to flip the “weird” taunt on its head.
“What a… freak,” he wrote on X, using a common vulgarity, over a video clip of Harris saying she supports access to gender reassignment surgery for prisoners.
And if Harris thinks he can laugh at Trump, he has an answer for that too — by attacking the way he laughs.
“You can tell a lot by laughing,” he said, trying out “laughing Kamala” as a nickname. “She’s crazy.
