It's not the first time anyone called Trump "weird." On his show, John Oliver has regularly gone off about Trump's innate strangeness. And Trump's behavior has always been on the creepy side of weird. I know she's regretted not saying anything, but I do wonder how things would have gone if Hillary Clinton had stopped in the middle of an answer at her second debate, a town hall with Trump in 2016, when he was stalking behind her, so close she could hear his labored breathing and huffing as she answered a question, and said, "Back up, you creep. Get away from me." They probably would have accused her of being hysterical because that's how shitty and sexist the media was towards Clinton.
And, you know, a bunch of out here in the filthy environs of the internets, with our blogstackletters or whatever, have gone off for years about the unending fucking weirdness of Donald Trump and his crazed followers. I haven't been shy about calling a weirdo a fucking weirdo. When he started hugging the American flag like it was the teddy bear his prick of a father took away from him when he was two, I wrote, "It was weird. No, that's not strong enough. It was fucking weird. Disturbing even that such an overtly simple-minded move could garner such a strong reaction, that while the left passes around photos of it to mock, the right sends it around with pride. Hell, the White House tweeted the picture with the single word, 'America!' Which is just even weirder. I wasn't triggered or anything. I just thought, 'How fucking pathetic. Of him. Of everyone there.' And how, for lack of another phrase, fucking weird."
It's been one of those things that some of us have wanted his opponents to emphasize because bullying always has supporters and racism is just built into the right. Sure, the line "this is not normal" became a thing, a way of responding to the broad array of fuckery committed by the Trump administration, but also to the rhetoric coming from the MAGA movement and the GOP. But that didn't really capture the essence of what so many of us were feeling and saying (although, you know, "abnormal" might have been fun) because it really is just so strange to see the Republican Party transform itself into a giant machine that is at the service of a single man, a rapist and felon, and his whims.
Deeply fucked people do that, and, goddamnit, we tried outrage. We tried to point out the stripping of rights, the violence from white nationalists, the alliance with Nazis, the desire to dismantle democracy. We shouted that shit from the rooftops, and that's exactly the reaction all those idiotic fucknuts wanted. When you express pain to a bunch of sadists, they get off, laughing at you for giving them the gleeful orgasms that they wanted by baiting you into your rage.
Apparently, though, they don't have a shame fetish. All it took was Minnesota Governor Tim Walz echoing a sentiment that's been out there, saying, "These guys are just weird" on MSNBC last Tuesday, and adding later in the day, "These are weird people on the other side. They want to take books away; they want to be in your exam room." It was like light bulbs went off all over and "weird" went viral because, goddamn, it's perfect. And they can't fucking handle it.
It implies "creepy" as well as strange and fucked up, and if demanding to examine the genitals of children to check their sex for playing sports in middle school is anything, it's strange and creepy and fucked up. So is listing innocuous words that people are not allowed to use. So is denying history and science that is plainly factual and threatening to jail librarians as sex offenders if anyone under 18 can get their hands on a book that mentions that gay people exist. So is your Bible fetish, forcing classrooms to display the Ten Commandments and forcing teachers to teach biblical lessons in public school classes. So is any politician declaring that childless people are "sociopaths" and women who don't have children are miserable. So is a presidential candidate talking about Hannibal Lecter and water pressure and bird-killing windmills and how the women who said he raped and groped them aren't attractive enough for him. So is declaring that an election was "rigged" when every single court and every single expert says it wasn't. It's all, all, all so fucked, so creepy, so wrong, so weird. And I haven't even gotten into the shit their voters do. Take off your red cap, Jesse. You look like a dickhead.
Kamala Harris is just a little older than me, and I'm sure that, as someone watching Democrats back down time and again from Republican attacks, she wished for the gloves to come off. Like me, she watched as the idea of going high when they go low failed to meet the moment, with Democrats trying to stick to some kind of unwritten rules of behavior. I mean, I wrote about this shit starting in 2003, about how Democrats need to be willing to stop depending on norms and traditions and fuck all that only rarely works and only at moments of great crisis, like in 2008 or in 2020. What about times like now, when there really is no great crisis in the United States other than the chaos that Trump and MAGA pukes bring about? Yeah, it's time to get in the gutter and bring the fight to them, but on our terms.
So we get the Harris campaign machine, which is an amped up version of the Biden machine, shifting into mocking mode with social media posts immediately reacting to Trump's insanity in speeches and interviews with "This is weird" and that have headlines like "JD Vance Is a Creep (Who Wants to Ban Abortion Nationwide)." They also post ludicrous things from Fox "news" and from the candidates, like a deleted part of JD Vance's campaign website about his being "100% pro-life." They're not afraid to get juvenile, with a post that says, "JD Vance does not couch his hatred for women."
A joke about Vance fucking couches? Saying he has "hatred for women"? That's going way further than even Hillary Clinton did when she posted, for instance, "A running list of all the worst things Donald Trump has said about women. It’s long." She called Trump "unqualified and temperamentally unfit," which wasn't cruel enough. It was what was expected from Democrats: harsh, sure, but dignified. But saying he's "weird"? No one likes to be called that unless it's meant in an endearing way, like "eccentric." And plenty of men have egos that are so fragile that a woman calling them "weird" or "creepy" makes them collapse into a ball of incel self-loathing.
This whole campaign just feels different now. It's filled with life not just because Harris is younger and more energetic than Biden (although, at 60, she would still be older than most of the leaders in Europe). It's because I don't think the corporate media and many older Democratic leaders understand the vibe shift or the change in the zeitgeist, if you wanna be fancy.
I'll go with it being a paradigm shift. See, I don't think that those people I mentioned up there get that the old shit is done and the old ways of responding to Republican attacks have to be shitcanned. Lemme put this in Gen X musical terms. Remember how shitty hair metal was so popular and then Nirvana came along and destroyed the whole genre? All the shit that we have put up with for so long doesn't apply right now because Harris has done what Biden could not. With Biden running, we just wanted to get him in office and keep things going as they are. Harris offers something different.
The Harris nomination and campaign and movement (which is really what it's become) offers hope, yes, in the Obama sense of making life better for more people. But because she's taking the fight right to MAGA's dumb faces, she is offering hope that Trump and MAGA can be crushed out of existence. The "weird" attack has punctured the rhetorical dome they were living under. They are hurt and confused, like baboons with shit to hurl but no idea how to hurl it in the right direction. And taking down JD Vance, who was the billionaire class's choice to make Trumpism outlast Trump, is a strategy that cuts off a future.
And what does Harris offer in these months before the election? Not just a sense of purpose, but a sense of joy, as seen in her rallies where the jubilation between people of all ages is palpable. Megan Thee Stallion? Charli XCX? Beyonce'? Sign us all the fuck up. And it's not just a call to duty, but a call to enjoy it while you're doing it because you know that the people who have fucked with you for the last nine years are shitting themselves in fear. What I love is the feeling that, unlike Biden and Obama before him, she won't forgive and forget and demand we move forward without accountability for those who dragged us backward. God, I hope that's true.
Yeah, the weirdos are gonna get a whole lot weirder before this is over. But maybe now that we're making them play our game, we can make the rules.
