Donald Trump is still weird

The grievance machine humming under the hood of conservative politics is always racing, but it’s extremely fuel-efficient. Republicans are still running on decades-old tropes about a welfare state that, to a large degree, no longer exists. They’re still fuming about Covid lockdowns, even though the total length of those could be counted in days. And if you get a real GOP dinosaur talking, you might even hear a rant about “Obama phones” or the Affordable Care Act’s supposed “death panels.”

None of this should come as a surprise. Their figurehead, Donald Trump, is a paragon of eternal grudge-holding. He rode his resentment at being iced out of Manhattan parties all the way to the White House, and his beefs have steered American politics through a long red-a*sed decade. In his second term, Trump has put the full power of the state behind repeatedly debunked conspiracies about criminal immigrants and how the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him by Joe Biden and Democrats, with the help of everyone from Venezuela to China. It was this latter grievance that got him in hot water on Friday morning, after he shared a video on Truth Social that resurrected his false claims of widespread voter fraud and international conspiracy and also included a racist clip of former President Barack Obama and his wife Michelle as apes. (After Trump’s press secretary Karoline Leavitt initially defended the post amid bipartisan criticism, it was deleted and the White House blamed an unidentified staffer. On Friday evening, the president refused to apologize.)

All the while, conservatives have blindly followed Trump’s lead, with some even dropping their supposedly bedrock beliefs in the Second Amendment and opposition to government overreach in the process.

The degree of rage MAGA has been able to sustain over a small number of petty squabbles is impressive, really. The choice to include pronouns in bios has caused conservative conniptions for years. A belief in “cancel culture” run amok is an ever-burning tire fire of the right that has been raging since the ‘70s, when it was called “political correctness.”  When something gets stuck in the right’s craw, it stays stuck.

All this makes it even more infuriating that the messaging gurus of Kamala Harris’ 2024 presidential campaign abandoned the “weird” tag so quickly. The insult, which was first launched at Trump and Vice President JD Vance by Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, clearly rattled a party that conceives of itself as the voice of the average American. (The epithet was also largely responsible for elevating Walz to become Harris’ running mate.) In response, the GOP attempted to flip the script in classic rubber-glue playground fashion. Democrats were “the weird ones,” Trump said. “I’m a lot of things, but weird I’m not.”

The bait-and-switch didn’t work. Democrats from then-Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg to Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy pointed to specific GOP statements and policy goals that deviated from the American mainstream. “Your party’s obsession with drag shows is creepy. Your candidate’s idea to strip the vote away from people without kids is weird,” Murphy wrote on X. “The right wing book-banning crusade is super odd. It’s just so, so far outside.”

“Weird” became a meme and an effective shorthand to frustrate the online efforts of conservatives. It faded into the background as Walz was seemingly sidelined in the closing days of Harris’ historically short 107-day campaign.

A former Harris aide told POLITICO in a postmortem that Walz was “encouraged to stop focusing on the ‘weird’ criticism.” Another described Walz as “bubble-wrapped” and criticized the way he was used.

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But Walz was right. These guys really are weird. The average American doesn’t know who former Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter is, let alone why they should hate him on Trump’s behalf. They’re not privy to the power politics of Manhattan after parties. And Vance’s shift from liberal-Appalachian whisperer to a pseudo-Groyper veep betrays a craven desire for power that most of the country would find off-putting.

The numbers bear it out. In 2025, nearly 128 million people watched the Super Bowl compared to the 12 million or so who tuned into Animal Planet’s long-standing counter-programming, the Puppy Bowl. Mocking “Sportsball” types are well-represented among the extremely online-right from which Trump’s inner circle takes their cues, but Trump’s decision to skip this year’s Super Bowl puts him in the extreme minority of Americans who would jump at the chance to attend, regardless of who is appearing in the halftime show. His dislike of this year’s performer, superstar Bad Bunny, makes him an outcast twice-over. Turning Point USA’s alternative “All-American Halftime Show,” which is being headlined by the grisly has-been known as Kid Rock, is unlikely to peel many eyeballs away from the Big Game.

As Trump’s FBI launches raids on Georgia polling facilities, most Americans — including a majority of Republicans — believe the 2020 presidential election was legitimate. While the Department of Homeland Security cooks up strongman memes to sell its ongoing raids in Minnesota, a majority of Americans support ICE’s complete abolition.

Pointing out that the GOP’s beliefs are abnormal won’t make the violence and lawlessness stop, of course, and it certainly won’t shut Trump up. But Democrats should still reclaim Walz’s deceptively simple epithet while also taking up the cause of normal Americans by highlighting issues including affordability, housing and infrastructure. The throughline of the midterms should be simple: These creeps don’t speak for us.

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