And JD Vance Is Far From The Only Weird Republican, Mascara Or Not
Rep Tim Ryan lost the 2022 Ohio Senate race to JD Vance 2,192,114 (53.0%) to 1,939,489 (46.9%) despite Ryan having massively outspent Vance $56,348,529 to $14,791,822. (This was somewhat evened out by outside independent spending— about $55 million for Vance and $27 million for Ryan.) Vance won Trumbull and Mahoning counties which Ryan represented in Congress. Ryan lost because he paid attention to establishment consultants who insisted he back away from populist positions and move in a more GOP-lite stance on economic issues, deflating enthusiasm on the left.
On Tuesday, L.A. Times columnist Anita Chabria dealt with the Democrats’ “weird” attack on Vance by interviewing Vance, who agreed that Vance is weird, “There’s no doubt. He’s a weird guy. I know that he’s got probably a lot of trauma and that stuff but he’s very uncomfortable in his own skin and I think a very insecure guy. And not to play barstool psychologist, I think he just wants to control his outer world. He wants a Caesar to come in and take over the country. Trump is really vehicle for him, through a strongman, to gain some stability.”
She asked him why the “weird” messaging has caught on so much better than the Biden message that Trump is a would-be dictator. He said “it’s less scary. When you scare people into the mode of like, ‘Oh, shit,” then you get in the fight-or-flight mode and you’re not engaging your brain in the way you think, the way you need to. And nobody wants to be more scared than they already are. We’re scared about climate, scared about democracy, scared about the economy. I mean, there’s only so much that people will pay attention to if you’re just going to try to freak them out. The ‘weird thing,’ on the other hand, has a different entry point in your brain. Like, I think J.D. wears mascara. I’ve seen him, and I’m like, huh. But I’ve never said it publicly, because I’m like, is that mascara, is it? I mean, I’ve seen it on my wife, but, you know. You kind of doubt yourself because it’s so weird. But I think the weird thing can easily enter your brain and you get planted in your brain. It’s kind of a reverse on how Trump does his psychological operations on people, you know, like little Marco, and low energy Jeb. He plants that seed, and it’s so clear of a truth that Jeb Bush walked right into it, just by being Jeb Bush. And little Marco walked into it, just by being a little Marco with his platform shoes. Now it’s like everything J.D. does, this is the same thing we were worried about with President Biden. Everything Biden was going to do was going to play into the narrative that had already firmed up around his age, then the debate. So it didn’t matter, he could do a great press conference, but he called Kamala Trump, and that’s all that was going to be fed into the broader narrative. And so I think that’s where Trump and J.D. are now. Now J.D. is a weirdo in everybody’s mind, and so everything he does is going to be weird. Now everything they’re doing is looking odd, and everything J.D. does is going to be odd because the seed has now been planted. Just from a guy standing in Ohio looking at what’s going on, this is really good for Democrats… I don’t think the average voter, the low information voter [is] going to vote on who’s cool and who’s weird, or who’s got the energy and positivity.”
Ryan loved that Trump’s two moron sons— who he never took seriously— talked him into Vance against his own best judgment. At the same time Adam Serwer was noting that Trump has been trying, without success, to get rid of the weirdos in his political orbit. Or at least some of thee weirdos. “Democrats, wrote Serwer, “aren’t the only ones who think conservative ideologues are weird. Trump thinks they are too— if weird means extreme and unpopular. In fact, he’s been trying to escape them. The problem is he can’t, at least not fully, because they’re his people.”
Serwer mostly talked about the Heritage Foundation’s neo-Nazi Project 2025 and the Trump loyalists who created it. “According to Rolling Stone, Trump has ‘been privately— and very bitterly— complaining about the abortion policies laid out in the lengthy Project 2025 manifesto, and trashing the Project 2025-linked “lunatics” who keep demanding unpopular abortion bans and restrictions.’ Trump is right to worry that Project 2025 is a political loser.”
Democrats’ use of “weird” is not a stroke of political genius. It is novel language for doing something very typical in politics, which is highlighting your opponents’ unpopular positions. It has caught on because social media incentivizes engaging in ideological extremism to stand out. And in a GOP where loyalty to Trump is the paramount value, ideologues can rise by pledging fealty to him, even if their beliefs and public conduct are very strange.
Many of these ideas are likely repellent to many of Trump’s supporters, who are energized by his anti-establishment rhetoric but who have more moderate views on economic matters and even abortion. (Trump similarly pretends to diverge from the conservative orthodoxy on economics and abortion, but his actual record tells a different story.) Trump often comes off as much less “weird” despite being just as extreme, because he doesn’t speak as often in the ideological lexicon of right-wing activists, academics, and think tankers. Being associated with the ideologues who ran his administration last time and who would run it next time gives up the game, and lets the public know who would really be in charge during a second Trump administration, while the president live-tweets Fox News every day just like he did four years ago.
But whatever Trump says about Project 2025, his ties to it are undeniable. A CNN review in mid-July found that “at least 140 people who worked in the Trump administration had a hand in Project 2025,” and “nearly 240 people with ties to both Project 2025 and to Trump, covering nearly every aspect of his time in politics and the White House—from day-to-day foot soldiers in Washington to the highest levels of his government.”
Condemning Project 2025 because it is a political loser does not mean that Trump won’t pursue many or most of its recommendations. As the Ronald Reagan staffer Scott Faulkner once famously put it, “Personnel is policy.” And whatever Trump says about policy in public, the people who put together Project 2025 are his personnel.
…Trump chose an ideologue, J. D. Vance, as his running mate. Surveys suggest that Vance— who wrote an introduction to a new book by Kevin Roberts, the head of the Heritage Foundation, which produced Project 2025— is one of the most unpopular vice-presidential picks in the modern history of polling, in part because of what is a frankly very weird obsession with childless people, women in particular. Vance, a proponent of making abortion illegal nationwide and preventing women from crossing state lines to get the procedure, has attacked Trump’s likely rival, Vice President Kamala Harris, as a “childless cat lady,” even though she is a married stepmother of two. He’s separately described people without children as “more sociopathic.” Freedom includes the right to judge; it does not include taking people’s fundamental rights away because they choose to live differently from you in ways that do not affect you at all.
…Being obsessed with strangers’ personal lives, especially to the point where you’re trying to use the power of the state to force everyone else to live according to your values rather than their own, comes across as pretty weird. Even Trump understands that. He also understands that, weird or no, this is the agenda the movement behind him wants to pursue. If he can obscure that agenda long enough to get elected, that movement might actually succeed.
Jonathan Bernstein’s Weird asserts that “it’s escaped from campaign rhetoric into the larger culture; We have plenty of evidence Democrats, or at least a lot of Democrats, especially the most politically active ones, really love it; [but] We have no real idea how it sounds to people who pay less attention to politics or what effect if any it will have on their turnout and vote choice in November.”
He noted that Kamala’s campaign “may be eager to give her strongest supporters something they’ll like right away, which might contribute to keeping the initial surge of energy at the beginning of her campaign going— which can have very tangible effects in terms of volunteer hours and fundraising. What’s more, to the extent that the neutral media buys the idea that Trump et al. are ‘weird’ it may pay off in how they cover things down the line.”
As far as the substance: “Weird” should work, because it’s basically true! Dave Karpf has a good summary of some of the particulars, such as their opposition to “Taylor Swift and the NFL and Bud Light,” but it’s only a small subset of all the bizarre things that politicians and other high-visibility Republicans regularly talk about, Such as, for example, Vance’s criticism of Simone Biles.
What’s important to understand about this is it’s not random, and it’s not really personal about either Trump or Vance. Both of them are reacting to the incentives created by the current Republican Party, which is dominated by its party-aligned media. For Fox News and its smaller competitors, and for the even smaller radio shows and web pages, the way to make money is to find a relatively tiny audience and keep them tuning in. There’s no downside to being weird; normal people who pay limited attention to politics aren’t really in the potential audience anyway.
… As serious legislators and policy-makers are driven out of the Republican Party, more and more of those who remain have getting on GOP-aligned media as the only worthwhile goal in their political careers, and will say what it takes to get there. Or they are basically just part of the audience, and actually believe a lot of nonsense. Or both. All of which makes those media outlets even more important within the party.
So yeah: The Republican Party is weird, and there’s not much that a single campaign, even a presidential campaign, can do about it. Trump and Vance got where they are by being this way; politicians keep their promises, and that includes an implicit promise to be mainly concerned with the fringiest portion of the Fox News audience. There may be some way in the longer term to break the cycle, but it’s not going to happen with Donald Trump around. No matter how many votes it costs them.
Weird.
Think of Marjorie Traitor Greene, Lauren Boebert, Gym Jordan and Matt Gaetz as examples. But those are figures known as “weird” nationally—trined seals rushing to right-wing media to beg for fish. On every level of Republican politics we’re experiencing the same thing as Republican politicians have embraced the party’s embrace of weird. Another one of these oddballs, Vance ally William “Troy” Balderson, has a tendency to believe it’s ok the children of his district are exposed to radioactive poisons, at least that’s what his donor and voting record show. Everyday, his neighbors and family are exposed to fracking and chemical wastes pumped into the ground, into wells similar to those that have leaked into Ohio’s groundwater in the very recent past. But, Balderson doesn’t change his stance— not just because he’s weird but because of the hundreds of thousands of dollars his corporate paymasters funnel into his campaigns year after year.Balderson, like many Americans, does not have a nuanced understanding of atmospheric chemistry or physics, but as does any moron, expresses his perspective that a fossil fuel can be “green” and “clean”— disagreeing with anyone who’s head isn’t fully up their own ass (or the ass of a random oil executive). Just yesterday, this weirdo posted Russian propaganda claiming Imane Khelif was trans, without any evidence except the findings of an agency banned by the International Olympics committee filtered through Russian propaganda machine TASS “news” agency. You’d think a representative that spends so little time helping his constituents, hiding away like the troll he is, would have a few minutes to research before posting. I noticed others from the Putin-wing of the GOP, like Matt Gaetz, were posting the same disinformation on Twitter. As American citizens, they have an odd relationship supporting freedom. Balderson also co-sponsored a national abortion ban, is opposed to freedom to marry who you love, and the freedom to get an equal education.
His opponent, Jerrad Christian, who does understand the atmosphere as a former meteorologist, and freedom as a military veteran, told us that “The people voting for Troy aren't getting what they expected when voting. I believe they didn’t imagine wealthy oil executives deciding they don’t deserve clean water and using the votes they bought to make sure they don’t get it. I imagine most do not know that Ohio’s education has been unconstitutionally underfunded for years, including when Troy held state office, which paved the way for charter schools to come in and ‘save the day’ from poorly funded public schools. Education is the great equalizer, and humans have a right to knowledge. There is nothing I won’t do or sacrifice to make sure my son, and all of our children, grow up in a safe, healthy world with every advantage they can have. Clean water is a minimum standard that my opponent can’t even seem to meet.”
So, Republicans and weirdos, let your freak flags fly with your pro-Russia, anti-freedom, anti-American agendas— it’s good for your opponents. And non-Republicans— weirdos or not— please consider helping Jerrad Christian replace Balderon in Congress by contributing what you can to his campaign.
On Wednesday, Noah Smith noted that “Trump has been the expert at creating insults that get under his opponents’ skin. But over the past week or so, Kamala Harris and her allies have come up with a put-down so devastating that Republicans seem to have no answer for it. They’re calling Trump and his VP nominee J.D. Vance ‘weird.’ He pointed out that “’Weird’ doesn’t seem like a particularly harsh or savage label. It’s much more milquetoast than any number of insults Trump has deployed over the years. But it appears to be driving MAGA types absolutely up the wall:
“Weird” is catching on among Democratic politicians as way to help define their GOP “opponents. Smith explains why the epithet is hitting so hard— why it gets under GOP skins and why Democrats love it so much.
To Republicans, “weird” means “outgroup”
To Republicans, being called “weird” is a bitter demonstration of their defeats in the culture wars of the 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s.
When I was growing up in the 90s, my friends and I — a bunch of nerdy kids pretty similar to the protagonists of Stranger Things— loved to call ourselves “weird.” We didn’t make that up ourselves— it was a cue we took from pop cultural figures that we admired, from Weird Al Yankovic to Dr. Demento. It was also something we learned from our parents— hippie Boomers who rebelled against the dominant culture of the 60s by embracing countercultural figures like Abbie Hoffman or Timothy Leary.
This embrace of “weirdness” wasn’t purely political— much of it was about the push for individualism and self-expression that defined 20th century American culture. Lots of Americans wanted to avoid traditional corporate jobs, listen to avant-garde music, explore fantasies like Dungeons and Dragons, learn about foreign cultures, experiment with sex and drugs, create alternative fashions, and so on.
But there was undeniably a political aspect to it as well. “Weirdness” meant self-expression, but it also meant rebellion against the dominant conservative culture of the day. In the 60s, “normal” required supporting your country and its troops in Vietnam, while protesting the war was “weird”. As late as the 1990s, people who went to church and had traditional families and avoided drugs were “normal” in most of America, and gay people and atheists and intentionally childless people and drug users were “weird.”
…When Democrats like Kamala Harris call conservatives “weird,” I think it presses directly on this open wound. It’s a bitter reminder of the hegemony they’ve lost since 1990, and the exile in which they now wander. “Weird,” to conservatives, means “outgroup,” and that’s why they hate it so much.
To Democrats, “weird” means the unrest of the 2010s
I do not think Democrats are using “weird” as a taunt about cultural hegemony, even if that’s how many Republicans take it. Instead, I think Democrats are using the term to represent the chaos and unrest of the 2010s— something they associate with Trump, and which they increasingly want to leave behind them.
Consider this op-ed by Rex Huppke in USA Today. Huppke takes the opportunity to vent about all the genuinely creepy and wacky behavior that has come to be associated with the MAGA movement:
There are millions upon millions of American voters— certainly liberals and independents, and I’d bet a decent slice of conservatives— who have spent the past eight or so years watching Trump and the MAGA circus and thinking: “Wow, this is all very weird.”…
The rise of Trumpism and the bizarre chaos it ushered in— from family members lost down conspiratorial rabbit holes to the denial of facts and abandonment of shared reality— has given us election lies and Trump-branded Bibles and Rudy Giuliani giving an insane news conference outside a landscaping business in Philadelphia and a dude called the QAnon Shaman wearing a horned fur cap as he joined an attack of the U.S. Capitol…
It’s certainly the most apt label for Trump and his unhinged rants, his nonsensical stories about sharks or Hannibal Lecter, his blabbering cruelty and unfiltered spouting of whatever odd thought passes through his hate-addled mind…He is supported by slavish Republicans who once openly denounced him, and their hypocrisy is weird…The GOP presidential nominee is a twice-impeached, one-term president who was convicted of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records in a case involving hush money paid to an adult film star. He has had multiple bankruptcies, faces hundreds of millions of dollars in fines from a civil fraud ruling and was found liable of sexual abuse. And he is revered by the Republican Party's evangelical base…
Do you want to know what’s weird to a majority of Americans who are just trying to live their lives? EVERYTHING IN THOSE PREVIOUS THREE PARAGRAPHS!
I think the weirdness of Trump’s movement comes partially from the fact that it’s so centered around social media, and social media aggregates and encourages some of the weirdest people in the country. I also think part of the weirdness is that with the decline of Christianity, weird cultish conspiracy theories like QAnon have filled some conservatives’ need for a sense of mystery and connection with the ineffable. Christian conservatism provided a bedrock base of “normalcy” to the right-wing movements of the 1980s, 90s, and 2000s; now the GOP standard-bearer is an irreligious sybarite who cares little for Jesus Christ, and evangelical Christians are an often-uneasy junior partner in Trump’s coalition.
But the biggest reason MAGA is so weird is probably just the unrest of the 2010s. The era of political, social, and cultural upheaval that began around 2013-14— and which I often liken to the late 60s and early 70s— drove a lot of Americans kind of nuts, and at the same time it elevated many of the craziest people to positions of influence and attention. Social media exacerbated this, of course, but if you read about episodes of unrest in other countries, or in America’s own past, you’ll quickly see a lot of commonalities. Everyone gets a little weirder when the social and political foundations of their society start to shake.
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