Where to Go From “Weird”

Writing in Axios, Alex Thompson reports that Vice President Kamala Harris and her top advisers—let’s call them Kamalot—have discarded, as the campaign’s principal theme, the threat that former President Donald Trump poses to democracy. This is excellent news, because fearmongering wasn’t working.

Biden called preserving democracy “the central cause of my presidency,” and in March his consigliere Mike Donilan told The New Yorker’s Evan Osnos, “By November, the focus will become overwhelming on democracy.” President Joe Biden’s reelection campaign, Thompson noted, spent $10 million placing everywhere an ad with Robert DeNiro speaking darkly about Trump “threatening to be a ‘dictator,’ to terminate the Constitution.” The Harris campaign’s first ad echoed this theme. “There are some people,” said Harris, as images of Trump and J.D. Vance filled the screen, “who think we should be a country of chaos, of fear, of hate.”

But on Wednesday, Future Forward USA PAC, which is Kamalot’s main Super PAC, aired a much sunnier TV spot during NBC’s Olympic coverage. In the ad, Harris says: “I’m running to fight for an America where the economy works for working people, where you only have to work one job to pay the bills, and where hard work is rewarded.” Super PACs are theoretically barred from coordinating their message with campaigns, but the membrane dividing them is permeable. Kamalot is smartening up.

Harris can’t drop the democracy theme entirely, because (a) Trump really is a threat to democracy, and (b) saying so plays well with older voters, who wield outsize influence (in 2020, 60 percent of all voters were 50 years or older). I’m 66, and everybody I know is so thoroughly terrified there will be another Trump presidency that they’re saying they’ll leave the country if he wins. Not me. If Trump wins, I’m staying here to fight the son of a bitch.

Sounding the alarm about Trump’s threat to democracy won’t win Harris the election. Kamalot needs to reach swing voters, and the Trump Menace just doesn’t interest this group. As David Leonhardt argued forcefully last week in The New York Times, these people want to know what Harris can do for working people. A July Times/Siena poll, conducted shortly before Biden dropped out, asked undecided registered voters which issue was most important. They chose, in declining order: “Economy or inflation” (21 percent), “Candidates’ character or competence” (11 percent), “immigration” (8 percent), “foreign policy” (8 percent), and “abortion” (4 percent). Bringing up the rear was “State of democracy; corruption,” which logged only 2 percent. Leonhardt also cited a poll by the pro-Democratic nonprofit Blueprint, which tested 15 messages for the Harris campaign and found that “Vice President Harris understands the struggles of working families” scored highest and “Vice President Harris is a champion of American democracy” scored lowest.

Please indulge me with an I-told-you-so. I’ve spent the last couple of years arguing against doom porn (The Atlantic is the worst, pronouncing at every opportunity the imminent end to everything Atlantic readers hold dear) and trying to reacquaint Democrats instead with the working class, without whom Harris can’t win. As I pointed out earlier this week, a July 24 memo from Kamalot listing “key parts of the Democratic base” neglected to mention working-class voters or labor unions. That was dumb. No Democrat won the presidency without a working-class majority, going back 100 years, except Biden in 2020, under the freakish circumstance of Trump’s catastrophic mismanagement of Covid, now faded from memory. (Which reminds me: The Times/Siena poll didn’t ask about health care, where Democrats routinely trounce Republicans in polls. The Blueprint poll incorporated health care, appropriately, into “struggles of working families,” which is to say the economy, as I argued for earlier this week.)

Democrats are experiencing a collective Eureka! over Minnesota Governor Tim Waltz (whom Kamalot is weighing for the vice presidential slot) identifying Trump and his fellow Republicans as “weird.” “These are weird people on the other side,” Waltz said July 23 on MSNBC. “They want to take books away, they want to be in your exam room.… These are weird ideas.” Kamalot embraced this theme immediately, calling Trump and Vance weird in two separate press releases. Harris herself followed up at a fundraiser in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, saying of Trump, “Some of what he and his running mate are saying is just plain weird.… I mean that’s the box you put that in, right?” Pretty soon everybody—Chuck Schumer, Pete Buttigieg—was calling the Republican ticket weird.

The Weird Wave caught Trump flat-footed. Trump told Laura Ingraham of Fox News, “You know who’s plain weird? She is plain weird—she’s a weird person,” even as he resisted Ingraham’s invitation to walk back his (spectacularly weird) statement to Christians that “in four years, you don’t have to vote again, we’ll have it fixed so good you’re not going to have to vote.”

The weirdness message works so well, wrote Washington Post columnist Monica Hesse, because it flips the script:

A central pillar of Trump’s campaign is the idea that liberals are perverted misfits.… [Conservatives] were with the prom king, who was telling them they were awesome, and the libs were outcasts in the library, probably being read to by a drag queen.

“Weird” intrudes on that narrative. It doesn’t entirely upend it, but it does plant a seed of doubt. What if, instead of being admired or feared, they are instead being laughed at? What if, instead of edgelords, they are actually just the kids in the corner eating glue off their hands?

Writing in The New Republic, Logan McMillen elaborated:

As far as ad hominems go, it’s disarming. It lands so lightly—compared, say, with Trump’s hyperbolic use of the word evil—that when the dismissal fits, as it manifestly does with Trump and Vance, it preempts any effective retort.… Describing someone as weird calls attention to their posturing and affectations that—when unnoticed—give them actual power. “Weird” takes the paper tiger, crumples it up and arcs it, across the classroom, and into the trash.

“Weird” is a way to be dismissive that doesn’t sound shaming or sanctimonious. Still, I don’t think it has legs. Like Hillary Clinton’s famous “basket of deplorables,” it’s the language of social exclusion, albeit in more playful form. Eventually, Republicans will fumble their way to a better response, perhaps along the lines of Merle Haggard’s 1969 song, “Okie From Muscogie.” In that masterpiece of rural resentment, a defiant traditionalist rejects all that’s become “normal” within mainstream (urban) culture:

We don’t make a party out of lovin’
But we like holdin’ hands and pitchin’ woo
We don’t let our hair grow long and shaggy
Like the hippies out in San Francisco do.

If there is promise in Democrats calling Trump weird—and I think there is—it doesn’t lie in the ostracizing word itself. A weirdo isn’t a menace; he’s just a loser. To call Trump a weirdo is a gentle way to express contempt, but it’s still contempt. We have no information about whether the public—as opposed to the chattering classes—responds favorably to the Weird Wave because it’s too new. But the Blueprint poll tested a related message, and the result was not promising. The message was that Harris is “one of the rare politicians who acts, talks, and thinks like a normal person, because she actually is one.” Implication: Unlike Donald Trump, Kamala Harris isn’t weird! This message didn’t flop, but it wasn’t a hit, either. It fell about midway between top and bottom (which is where you’d expect averageness to reside).

The usable message Kamalot stumbles onto when it calls Trump and Vance weird is this: Stop being afraid. Nobody cowers at the kid in the corner eating glue off his hand. (Maybe they should, but that’s another, darker story.) Nobody cowers at the paper tiger that you crumple up and toss into the trash. By extension, although Trump and Vance certainly want to govern the country in a reckless and authoritarian manner, we aren’t going to cower at them; we’re going to beat them. That’s the part of “weird” worth keeping.

The master of this style was Franklin Roosevelt, who famously said, “We have nothing to fear but fear itself.” Roosevelt was referring specifically to a financial panic that was shuttering banks, but he projected that same ebullient confidence through the Great Depression and World War II, when fascism posed a much more tangible threat. Ronald Reagan’s cheerful demeanor masked an appalling disconnection from the daily business of governing that in later years shaded into senility, but there’s no question it was a political asset. One of the many reasons I was sorry not to see Hillary Clinton elected president in 2016 was that I admired her skill at disarming hostile nutcases with good-humored incredulity. I’m thinking especially of her performance before the Benghazi committee in 2015. It was a master class in how to dismiss demagogic fools. Trump is the most demagogic fool in American political history, and although Clinton battled him reasonably well in the 2016 debates, that didn’t seem, alas, to matter. Still, it would have been worse had she shown fear.

Am I saying we have nothing to fear? I am not. In May and June the journalist Barton Gellman, formerly of The Washington Post and The Atlantic (and four decades ago an intern at The New Republic), along with the Georgetown Law professor Rosa Brooks and Nils Gilman, a historian at the Los Angeles–based Berggruen Institute, ran five “tabletop exercises” with 175 Democrats and Republicans to see how effectively a hypothetical future President Trump could be challenged were he to carry out his more authoritarian—i.e., weird—campaign promises. The sponsoring institution was the Brennan Center for Social Justice, where Gellman is a senior adviser.

In a Washington Post write-up of the event, Gellman said the results were “not encouraging.” The participant playing Trump successfully invoked the Insurrection Act to suppress peaceful domestic protests. A legal challenge was dismissed by the participant playing the judge who considered it. The participant playing the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff posed the relevant legal questions to his commander in chief about the actions and got himself fired. Happily, no blood was shed.

The Brennan Center’s Trump impersonator also got away with mass deportations; with firing inspectors general, senior civil servants, and the special counsel investigating him; with pardoning the “January 6 patriots”; with opening criminal investigations against Joe Biden and the House committee that investigated January 6; and with impounding federal funds (though it wasn’t clear from Gellman’s account whether a court challenge was filed).

The silver lining was that because there were too many civil servants for Trump to control or fire, pockets of resistance arose throughout the federal bureaucracy. As I’ve noted previously, the civil service did more than anyone else to preserve governing norms during Trump’s first (and, one hopes, only) term.

But the overall thrust was grim. “In none of the simulations was the pro-democracy opposition able to successfully reverse the overall thrust of the Trump team’s efforts, and on the whole, democratic norms and institutions rapidly disintegrated,” David Rothkopf, one of the participants in the exercise, recounted in TNR. “In each exercise, the basic rights and prerogatives of Americans were systematically stripped away, and the institutions of the U.S. government gradually ceased to resemble what they have been in the past.”

It’s hard to say how predictive the Brennan Center’s tabletop exercises were. But it seems to me that their chief value lay not in demonstrating to voters how fucked we’ll all be if Trump wins—a lot of us have a pretty good idea already, while others can’t be persuaded to care—as in preparing an effective resistance, should one be necessary. Gellman again:

Governors, mayors and state attorneys general may have more power than they know to defend against an authoritarian president. Friends of the rule of law should help them explore the fine points of their authority in advance. Blue states can pass laws and write regulations to restore protections that the federal government removes. They can bring civil suits and criminal prosecutions against unlawful acts undertaken in the president’s name.

To inoculate against the human instinct to fold under pressure, friends of constitutional government should seek “pre-commitments” from potential allies to take specific, lawful actions if certain red lines are crossed. When the time comes, individuals, organizations and corporate executives can be encouraged to draw upon the courage of convictions they expressed in advance.

That’s the stuff! As I’ve heard Brooks (who is a friend) recite on more than one occasion, quoting the labor activist and “troubadour of discontent” Joe Hill: Don’t mourn, organize.

We start with the presidential election. Kamalot has been performing well enough lately to send Trumpworld into a mild panic. Harris herself is projecting confidence. It’s a refreshing change from the doomsaying, however justified, in which Biden indulged. Being afraid doesn’t help! Just keep showing us your strength, Ms. Vice President, and explain how much better your ideas are than Trump’s, especially for the working class. You’ve got this.