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Kamala Harris allies deploy new Trump attack line: he is ‘just plain weird’

US Democrats have spent recent days trying out a relatively new attack line on Donald Trump: that he is weird. The tactic is almost certainly calibrated to resonate with young and independent voters who, polls show, are moving from marked disinterest in the now-dropped matchup between Joe Biden and his presidential predecessor to engagement in the 100-day contest between Trump and Kamala Harris.

In a press release Thursday, vice-president and presumptive Democratic nominee Kamala Harris issued a list of the main takeaways of what Trump had given the American people. “Is Donald Trump OK?” the X message said. The seventh of nine entries was: “Trump is old and quite weird?”

At a fundraising event in Massachusetts on Saturday, Harris tried out the line again, describing what Trump and running mate JD Vance had been saying about her as “just plain weird”.

“I mean that’s the box you put that in,” Harris said after Trump had called her “a bum” the previous day and Vance disparaged her in 2021 as a “childless cat (lady)”.

solsangraal ,

i really hope they move past this “we need to use gentle soft language in our criticisms of rapist convicted felon con man trump” bullshit

dogsnest ,
@dogsnest@lemmy.world avatar

You went easy on the lying treasonous, traitorous coward.

solsangraal , (edited )

i genuinely shake my head sometimes at democrats’ strategy. “weird” is not a bad thing to many many people. it’s a term that’s ridiculously easy for someone to say “yea. i’m weird. so?”

and then what? “so, THERE!!!”?

recall also that one of the most D cities in a deep red state, austin, celebrates their weirdness.

ffs democrats. get your shit together

edit: i hope I’m wrong, and “he’s weird” actually does something, and I’ll be more than happy to eat crow if it catches on and has a positive effect

Viking_Hippie ,

“weird” is not a bad thing to many many people

I’m one of those people, but fascists are REALLY not.

Seeing themselves as the only “normal” ones and declaring everything outside of the norm scary and evil is how they keep marginally functional in spite of enormous cognitive dissonance.

To a fascist, weird = abnormal = the OTHERS = evil

solsangraal ,

it’s not cognitive dissonance, it’s doublethink. there is no ‘dissonance.’ it seems insane, but they absolutely believe in 2 or more contradictory things with absolutly no qualms about it. they see no problem with bleating about “family values” while voting for a rapist adulterer with pornstar hush money problems.

ironhydroxide ,

Well duh, who could know better about family values than one who has had 3 official families and worked with beautiful women and girls so much? /s

prole ,

It evolved from one to the other. It’s like the brain developed their ability for double think as a response to the constant bombardment of cognitive dissonance. So instead of paying attention to that little ping of “hey, wait a second,” and having to make a semi-consciuos choice to ignore it, their brains straight up skip that part in order to reduce psychic pain.

It’s kind of insane just how on the money Orwell was.

I remember every time I’d read 1984 after the first, I would get to the part where he has that long, dry, treatise on the power of language as a means of control, and I used to dread it (skipped it usually after the first read through). It always seemed boring and just completely far-fetched. Yeah the whole world-building aspect of doublespeak and doublethink was great, but surely humans aren’t that susceptible to being controlled through language…

Welp. About that…

TrickDacy ,

Yes, Austin, known for its republican base. /s

ImADifferentBird ,
@ImADifferentBird@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

The thing is, normalcy bias prevents people from listening when you call them rapists, fascists, totalitarians, and all those other things they actually are. But “weird”? Weird is obvious, and it cuts into the Republican brand to the bone.

Trump’s whole appeal is based on a fiction of him representing the common man; the “blue collar billionaire”. More than that, the Republican party has built their entire brand for decades on a sort of radical normalcy, on being the voice of the “silent majority”, on being the representatives of “real America” against those latte liberal elites from the coasts. “Weird” takes all the wind out of those sails. They don’t actually represent middle America; they’re way too out there for that. And it’s long past time somebody said so.

And I sincerely doubt Austinites are going to flock to Trump because of the “weird” thing. Austinites are the kind of weird that Republicans have been trying to suppress for decades, and they know it.

HurlingDurling ,
@HurlingDurling@lemmy.world avatar

I’d like to see something to address his wannabe dictator tendencies

solsangraal ,

there are SO many things they could attack, and they choose “let’s call him weird”

i get more annoyed the more i think about it

girlfreddy OP ,
@girlfreddy@lemmy.ca avatar

My guess is Harris’ polling of the younger demographic is showing they’re fed up with the vicious rhetoric that’s been bounced around. So words that don’t cut most people - but would annoy the hell out of Trump - are used … if for no other reason than it becomes this joke that can be laughed at vs. enraging people.

catbum ,

Maybe your annoyance (understandable) is part of the point? There are so many things to attack, so many legitimate concerns, that simply calling him weird could spark a little reflection in his supporters and would-be voters, let alone the obvious shock to Trump’s vanity.

It’s not something you can easily deny as a conspiracy theory or fake news or any other excuse about his words and behavior. The man is weird. And psychologically, I think it’s harder to defend a person described that way, or at least makes a defender get a little self-conscious. Trump being deemed weird is really indefensible, and I think it could work in deflating the cult of personality around him.

Not everyone can identify maniacal dictator rhetoric for what it is, and the power dynamic is clearly alluring to Trump supporters. However, knowing a weird person or even being called weird at some point is something almost everyone has experience with. It’s uncomfortable. It makes you ask yourself what it is about a person that makes them weird. I think they’re on to something here. It might give supporters pause and will most definitely give Trump a complex.

prole ,

I’m sorry, I just don’t see it. If, 10+ years later you don’t already fucking know this guy is “weird” (to say the least), then hearing (more) Democrats say it won’t change your mind about anything.

Have you met these people? They embraced the term “deplorable” because they thought it was cute/clever.

10 years of telling my parents in various ways that this man is “weird” (among many other, much worse, things), and suddenly they’re gonna give a shit because Kamala Harris said it? Nah.

This is weak shit from the Democrats. Disappointed but not at all surprised.

catbum , (edited )

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.

vonbaronhans ,

It does make a little sense, when you consider that one of the goals is to demotivate fascists from voting at all.

Straight facts don’t dissuade fascists. They have every argument and deflection in their back pocket ready to go. Trump is a rapist/racist/traitor? Fake news, fake news, fake news.

But… Trump is weird? That hits them right in the ego. They’re not a principled policy-based voting base, it’s a cult of personality. Even if they want to say he’s NOT weird, it’s not a fact, it’s an opinion. So all it takes is showing a bunch of really strange gaffes, irrelevant rants, and incoherent ramblings, and you just might get would-be Trump voters to feel too embarrassed to vote for him.

It’s a long shot, but based on what I’ve been seeing, it appears to be effective so far. We’ll have to wait and see.

SlopppyEngineer ,

Using hard language is seen by his supporters as an attack on them all and drives them into the defensive making Trump stronger. Calling him weird sidesteps that reaction and deflates Trump, especially if he launches a weird rambling speech as a response.

solsangraal ,

i see the point you’re trying to make… to think, all it took to beat trump this whole time was mollycoddling him and his followers…

like they’ve been doing for almost 10 years…

Cocodapuf ,

No, it’s making fun of him. The trick that always worked on him and nobody has been using lately is making fun of him. Do you remember how defensive he got about all the talk about him having “small hands”? That shit drove him nuts.

It turns out that the schoolyard name-calling tactics are very effective on him, but Democrats mostly feel they’re above that.

prole ,

Buddy, they think literally everything is an attack on them.

Or have you not seen the article about Christians getting upset about the Olympics because some drag version of The Last Supper (only it was actually based on a Dutch painting portraying Bacchanalia, but that would take knowing more than 3 famous paintings, so forget it).

It’s time to stop making choices based on how this group of highly irrational people might react.

SlopppyEngineer ,

The hard core will never change their mind and be offended. The people that matter the most are the ones still capable of thinking by themselves, so I can understand not pushing them away.

prole ,

And you have evidence that these people exist (in an amount that is not statistically insignificant)?

prole ,

Fucking seriously… “He’s just plain weird”? Fucking really?

Of all of the adjectives, “weird”??

OldWoodFrame ,

That is language that Trump detractors like but doesn’t convince anyone new. If someone was supporting Trump, they aren’t going to be convinced by you re-stating that he’s a felon. Everybody knows that. If they support him at this point, they don’t care or they think it is an unfair attack because the arrest was political in whatever way. “Weird” strikes to his character which is at least a value judgement that you can reassess, and also relative to who he is running against.

AlternatePersonMan ,

Yes… If weird equals racist, loser, pedophile, soulless, senile, moron.

I am in full support of Harris, but I hate this attack. Am I understanding this correctly?Describing that asshole as weird is an insult to weird. Weird is what most of us are. I very much hope it is not something I have in common with that orange shit stain

hushable ,

for some reason, out of all of the adjectives you listed, weird is the only one that seems to have an effect on boomers. If it works, it works

Num10ck ,

how about Slimy?

dogsnest ,
@dogsnest@lemmy.world avatar

What’s that dwarf got to do with it?

solsangraal ,

calling trump “weird” is the textbook definition of “going soft on crime”

xmunk ,

I like the weird attack - it’s quite dismissive and robs him of power. I absolutely agree he’s a threat to democracy but he loves that attack because his narcissistic ass is empowered by it… Weird fits well enough but it also leans towards dismissing him from being a mainstream figure.

frog_brawler ,

Yikes… let’s try harder with the next one.

FlyingSquid ,
@FlyingSquid@lemmy.world avatar

I know they don’t want to use words like ‘senility’ and ‘dementia’ because of Biden, but come on. He’s not running now and he’ll only be president for a few more months.

girlfreddy OP ,
@girlfreddy@lemmy.ca avatar

I’m on the fence for using dementia or senility. In fact I think I prefer the ‘weird’ reference more than the other two, if for no other reason than there is no proof he is … but ‘weird’ covers a fair portion of what he is/does.

Bonus points if they start incorporating ‘convicted felon’ as the campaign progresses.

FlyingSquid ,
@FlyingSquid@lemmy.world avatar

This is politics. It doesn’t really matter if he’s got dementia, it just matters if he’s perceived as having dementia.

Imgonnatrythis ,

That language could backfire a little right now, but hopefully they do pull this out closer to election.

toast ,

While this can’t be the only line of attack, it is a good one. Already, Trump seems to be having difficulty attacking Harris, as he has to work to continually suppress saying the most racist and sexist things he can think of. Imagine if he has to react to the ‘weird’ criticism by continually, on the fly, suppress some of his stranger speaking topics too. I’m guessing the mental load of doing that might put an amusing amount of strain on the old man. Imagine Trump, if the rallies weren’t fun for him anymore. How’s he going to recharge that narcissistic brain of his?

Naich ,
@Naich@lemmings.world avatar

Fuck me. If he was only “weird” 80% of the world wouldn’t be scared shitless that he’ll get in power again.

No_Money_Just_Change ,

Yes, but proven to be bought by the Saudis and alleged to be blackmailed by Russia just does not seem to be the topic voters care about

prole ,

I hate this country

Viking_Hippie ,

I like how the MSM aren’t at all overhyping this by publishing articles about how brand new and brilliant it is several times a day for about a week.

I mean yes, it IS true that the American Fascist Party are a bunch profoundly weird creeps and squares and it’s probably ALSO true that that insult hits them harder than the more serious ones, but that’s not gonna keep being the case if the media makes everyone sick of hearing about it…

catbum ,

The following was initially part of a reply to another person:

Maybe the simple, gentle, “everyday” language here is truly the point? There are so many things to attack about Trump, so many legitimate concerns for his fascist, racist, sexist, ad nauseum behaviors. We’ve heard it all before. But simply calling him weird could spark a little reflection in his supporters and would-be voters while obviously delivering a shock to Trump’s vanity.

It’s not something you can easily deny as a conspiracy theory or fake news or any other excuse about his words and behavior. The man is weird. And psychologically, I think it’s harder to defend a person described that way, or at least makes a defender get a little self-conscious. Trump being deemed weird is really indefensible, and I think it could work in deflating the cult of personality around him.

Not everyone can identify maniacal dictator rhetoric for what it is, and the power dynamic is clearly alluring to Trump supporters. However, knowing a weird person or even being called weird at some point is something almost everyone has experience with.

It’s uncomfortable. It makes you ask yourself what it is about a person that makes them weird and how you should deal with it. It prickles something very basic in the human psyche. So I think they’re on to something here. It might give supporters pause and will most definitely give Trump a complex.

5in1k ,

And they’ll repeat it like a two year old that accidentally said something funny.

superminerJG ,

The other direct attacks have substance. But calling Trump the weird guy and not saying why he’s weird takes away all the instant counters. And when he throws a tantrum like a toddler because of this, you can damn well keep calling him weird.

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