“Weird” And Its Popular Cousin “Creepy” Are Freaking Republicans Out In A Way “Fascist” Never Did

But Is “Weird” Too Complimentary A Term For Trump And Vance?

Yesterday, Melissa Cropper wrote As a Rural Ohioan, I See J.D. Vance for Who He Is: “We respect authenticity and can spot a phony when we see one… Vance’s career has been built on a phony image of him as a product of and de facto spokesperson for poor, rural Appalachians, despite the fact that he was raised in a middle-class family in Middletown, Ohio— a city of about 50,000 people situated between Cincinnati and Dayton. His book Hillbilly Elegy has been touted as a handbook for understanding Appalachia, but I challenge rural Americans to see if they recognize themselves in its pages. Vance depicts rural communities using derisive stereotypes that lack any understanding of the impact of generational poverty— nor does he understand the challenges of living in areas devoid of good jobs, strong public schools, reliable transportation systems or affordable healthcare. While some of his characterizations could be overlooked, his opportunism is where rural voters will likely struggle with his lack of authenticity. After his book catapulted him to fame in 2016, in part through his lament for the scourge of drug addiction, Vance cynically started a phony charity, Our Ohio Renewal, under the guise of working on opioid addiction, joblessness and broken families. The organization fizzled out after barely doing any work other than help Vance launch his political career— in fact, one of the charity’s lone accomplishments was to send an addiction specialist with ties to Purdue Pharma, the manufacturer of OxyContin, to Ohio’s Appalachian region. His opportunism and lack of authenticity is also what drove him from being a firm critic of Donald Trump to becoming one of Trump’s biggest sycophants and political beneficiaries. In 2016, Vance labeled himself as a ‘Never Trump guy,’ calling Trump ‘noxious,’ ‘reprehensible’ and ‘America’s Hitler,’ and even floated the idea that he might vote for Hillary Clinton. He quickly changed his tune when he decided to run for U.S. Senate in Ohio as a Republican and wanted Trump’s endorsement. His craven flip-flopping is exactly the type of disingenuous self-promotion that rural voters can see a mile away.”

Cropper didn’t have to mention the word “weird,” though everything she had to say about Vance points in that direction, a direction thoroughly explained by L.A. Times columnist Mary McNamara who dubbed it the Republicans’ kryptonite and the Democrats’ ”magical talisman… Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz went viral with his observation that former president and current GOP nominee Donald Trump and his running mate J.D. Vance are ‘just weird.’ After Trump wildly attacked Vice President Kamala Harris, the leading Democratic candidate, on Fox and Friends, the Harris campaign responded with a scathing press release… that included in its bullet-point takeaways: ‘Trump is old and quite weird?’”

Since then the word has become a byword among Harris supporters, used to describe everything from Trump’s continued, and quite baffling, non sequiturs about “the late, great Dr. Hannibal Lecter” to Vance’s openly misogynistic charges that the Democratic Party is run by “childless cat ladies” and that people who do not have biological children are sociopaths.

“Weird” is the new “weak”— and it is driving Republican leaders crazy.

That is telling in itself. Democrats also have used “felon,” “rapist,” “Nazi,” “liar” and “fascist” to describe Trump, which most Republican leaders have simply taken in stride (felon being, of course, irrefutably true). 

But “weird”? That conservative politicians and pundits think is childish and mean.

Which is pretty weird, when you think about it. Trump is nothing if not childish and mean, a man who prides himself on personally mocking anyone he perceives to oppose him. Even as former GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ranaswamy wrote on Twitter, “This whole ‘they’re weird’ argument from the Democrats is dumb & juvenile,” Trump was workshopping a derogatory nickname for Harris, as he has for his other rivals over the years. (Crazy and/or Laughing Kamala appear to be front-runners, along with various mispronunciations of her name.)

So why are “weird” and its increasingly popular cousin “creepy” freaking Republicans out in a way that “fascist” or “authoritarian” never did?

Power. “Weird” does not convey a sense of power. Indeed, in its current usage, it is a dismissive term, a labeling of bizarre behavior or beliefs that implies not a threat but a diminishment.

“Weird” is not a shout of outrage or fear but a shrug of derision and disdain. “Stop being weird” is what one says when another’s actions and attitudes are so ridiculous that it honestly isn’t worth explaining why.

It is embraced, like “freak” or “geek,” by those— most often associated with the left— who refuse to be cowed by traditional hierarchies or schoolyard bullies. But it is not a term of self-identification historically embraced by those who seek power, especially of the authoritarian variety.

As Trump and many of his supporters have made clear, they admire authoritarians, including Vladimir Putin and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un— “I think he misses me,” Trump said at the Republican National Convention— as figures of strength. Trump has always campaigned on fear: of undocumented immigrants, “demolished” suburbs, restrictive gun laws, transgender children.

There is power in fear. In ridicule, not so much.

“Weird” takes fear out of the equation. As Walz said recently, “The fascists depend on fear… but we’re not afraid of weird people. We’re a little creeped out, but we’re not afraid.”

The Democrats’ use of “weird” turns the Republicans’ self-image on its head. For years, the GOP has positioned itself as the party of “real Americans,” fighting to reestablish “real” American values. “Weird” points out how many of their positions, including but not limited to their antiabortion stance and historic refusal to support broader access to health- and childcare, put them at odds with a majority of Americans.

Vance’s openly crackpot assertion that people who do not procreate are somehow less sane, and less American, than people who do is most definitely weird. As is Project 2025’s demand that a two-person, male-led, heterosexual, cisgender nuclear family should be the American standard. Republican leaders’ obsession with the “dangers” of drag queens, transgender people and the LGBTQ community in general makes them the outliers in a society that, particularly among its younger members, is generally supportive and accepting. 

… “Weird” makes it clear that Trump and his surrogates are the ones outside the norm, that their rhetoric and proposed policies deviate so far from what many Americans want from their leaders as to appear absurd. Trump, who is now regularly deriding Harris’ laugh, is not a fan of laughter. As many have now pointed out, he rarely laughs, and never at himself. 

“Weird” doesn’t just refute Trump’s MAGA stance, it also, and this is important, defuses it. Drains both the messengers and their messages of power. It’s weird that Trump doesn’t think America is a great nation. It’s weird that he wants to be president of a democracy when he doesn’t believe the democratic process works. 

Over the weekend, her colleague at The Times, Eric Schwitzgebel, seemed wary of the Democrats misusing the term and he wrote that “as a scholar who has made my academic career in part by celebrating weirdness, I object. Trump and Vance don’t deserve the compliment. The weird should be understood as whatever is strikingly contrary to the ordinary, predictable and readily comprehensible. It is a contrast with the normal… The resonance of [the Dems’ “weird”] strategy seems to reflect a widespread misunderstanding of who is really weird. The term should conjure the guy who rides through Berkeley on a unicycle, wearing a top hat; the business school standout who drops out to live on an organic seed farm; the middle school kid who plasters their bedroom with posters of squids and snails, ignoring pop culture in favor of a deep fascination with mollusk biology. Each is, in their own way, a wonder of nature, and the world is richer for having them. Trump’s and Vance’s behavior, on the other hand, reflects something more troubling. Their views toward women and reproductive rights, for example— demeaning the former and opposing the latter— are inappropriate and deservedly in the minority. But those views, unfortunately, are not rare enough to be truly weird. In fact, in contemporary America, Trump and Vance are normal, predictable and readily understood. They are ordinary, self-serving politicians, conforming to the demands of those who have rewarded their behavior.

“Things and people,” he wrote, “are not bad because they are weird. It seriously misrepresents the nature of Trump’s and Vance’s departure from liberal values to treat weirdness as their headline flaw.” He wrote that he grew up to embrace his “own weirdness and weirdness in general. I realized that to use ‘weird’ as an insult is implicitly to accept a conformist worldview— a worldview that devalues rather than appreciates difference and novelty… Using ‘weird” as a term of mockery, as though that’s the best descriptor of Trump and Vance, may be politically advantageous right now. But it denigrates the truly weird. It’s more accurate to call Trump and Vance liars, authoritarians, conscienceless political shape-shifters and wrong on policy. Those are ample, and more appropriate, reasons to vote against them.”