I get where you’re coming from, and you make a point with “deplorable” being meme-ified into some twisted identity thing. But I also think the collective “basket of deplorables” doesn’t apply here. Harris isn’t calling Trump supporters weird; she’s calling just him weird.
This does a few things: it keeps the focus on Trump, allowing supporters to distance themselves from the statement. The lack of attachment to any particular action, statements, belief, etc. lets a person think about it “nakedly.” Why is he weird?
Yes, we both know why, but this flips the script from the last 10 years from “here are various reasons why Trump is horrifying and could also be considered weird” to “Trump is weird, I’ll let you chew on that.”
It’s all in the delivery. Stating what he is without explaining why.
I think it’s worth returning a bit of agency to people in general to assess how they feel about that statement and come to their own conclusions. Edit: Especially because many of these people have attached themselves to Trump because they feel they have no agency otherwise. Could this be a means to cracking through the brainwashed masses? Something akin to, “wait, why am I idolizing this guy again?” Wishful thinking, yes, but being"plain weird" is such a broadly sweeping generalization that something should organically pop up in trump supporters’ brains, without our prompting.