Harris, Democrats Still Call Trump, Vance ‘Weirdos’: Here’s Why

Vice President Kamala Harris and her Democratic allies are highlighting a brand new line of criticism of Republicans — calling Donald Trump and his vice presidential candidate, Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance, “weird.”

Democrats have been quick to make use of the label in interviews and online, especially within the context of Vance’s comments on abortion and his earlier suggestion that political leaders who wouldn’t have biological children “don’t really have a direct stake” within the country.

The “weird” message clearly gave Democrats a narrative advantage they rarely had when President Joe Biden was still in search of reelection. The Trump campaign, which so often shapes political conversations with the previous president’s statements, spent days attempting to flip the script, highlighting things about Democrats that it says are weird.

“I don’t know who came up with that idea, but I give credit to them,” said David Karpf, a professor of strategic communications at George Washington University.

Karpf said that calling Republicans’ comments “weird” is the type of succinct take that resonates quickly with Harris supporters. Furthermore, Karpf noted, “it frustrates opponents, which leads them to further amplify it with unbalanced responses.”

“Trump-Vance has not been able to find an effective response so far,” Karpf said.

Harris and her allies have used this label steadily

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, a Democrat who’s on Harris’ shortlist for vice chairman, called Trump and Vance “just plain weird” in an interview with MSNBC last week, a comment the Democratic Governors Association — of which Walz is chairman — amplified in a post on X. Walz repeated that characterization on CNN Sunday, referencing Trump’s repeated mentions of fictional serial killer Hannibal Lecter from the film “The Silence of the Lambs” in campaign speeches.

In response to Trump’s appearance on Fox News on Thursday, the Harris campaign — in a press release titled “Statement on 78-Year-Old Felon’s Appearance on Fox News” — included “Trump Is Old and Kind of Weird?” in a listing of bullet points.

A day later, multiple Harris campaign press releases described her opponents in similar terms, simply stating that “J.D. Vance is weird,” partially due to his stance on abortion, and a Harris campaign spokesperson stated that Vance “has spent all week in the headlines because of his out-of-touch, weird ideas.”

Two Harris allies, Senators Brian Schatz of Hawaii and Chris Murphy of Connecticut, posted a video on X on Friday calling Vance’s earlier comments about limiting the political power of childless Americans a “super weird idea.”

And then, at her first fundraiser since becoming the presumptive Democratic vice presidential nominee, Harris used that characterization herself, calling attention to a few of Trump’s “wild lies about my record and what he and his running mate the vice president are saying is just weird.”

“I mean, this is the box you put it in, right?” she added.

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Many of the Democrats’ comments appear to harken back to a 2021 interview with Vance during which he lambasted some outstanding Democrats who wouldn’t have biological children — including Harris — calling them “childless cat people” who don’t have any “direct stake” in America.

But Harris’ own characterization of Trump as “weird” may go even further. In his 2021 book, political reporter Edward-Isaac Dovere wrote that Harris reportedly met along with her aides in 2018 to organize for her own presidential campaign.

As staff tried to organize her for the way she would react if Trump loomed over her during a debate, as he did with Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton in 2016, Harris reportedly joked, “I would turn around and say, ‘Why are you acting so weird? What’s wrong with you?’”

The Trump campaign tried to show the tables

On Sunday, Trump spokesman Steven Cheung released a recording of Walz calling Trump and Vance “weird” while campaigning for Harris and saying the presumptive Democratic nominee and her supporters had crossed a line by “trying to make everyone believe the shooting was staged,” referring to the attempted bombing at a Trump rally in Pennsylvania.

Overall, some Trump allies are attempting to steer the conversation back to Harris and what they call her failed policy ideas.

Donald Trump Jr., the previous president’s eldest son, turned to X on Monday to ask, “You know what’s really weird? Soft-on-crime politicians like Kamala are letting illegal immigrants out of prison so they can brutally attack Americans.”

On Saturday, Vance reposted an X video shared by Trump Jr. during which Harris talks about “climate anxiety, which is fear of the future and not knowing whether it even makes sense to think about having children.”

“It’s almost like these people don’t want young people to have families or something,” Vance wrote. “Really weird stuff.”

Democrats Hijack Republican Attack Lines to Support Harris

Republicans have long shared clips of Harris laughing and a few of her jokes or stories to attempt to paint the vice chairman as a weird person — particularly an anecdote she told last 12 months about her mother scolding her: “Do you think you just fell out of a coconut tree?”

The “coconut tree” story itself became a Democratic joke in the times since Harris took over the campaign. Many of her supporters adopted coconut emojis on their online accounts.

Matt Sienkiewicz, a professor of social communications at Boston College, said calling Republicans “weird” could possibly be a solution to adapt Republicans’ current tactics.

University at Buffalo political communication professor Jacob Neiheisel compared the “bizarre” message to Arizona Sen. John McCain’s 2008 try and portray Barack Obama as a celeb with no accomplishments.

“I think at a functional level this may be part of a coordinated effort to mitigate some of the long-standing efforts by the right to portray Harris in a similar way,” Neiheisel said.