It’s a hot and dusty day in the school playground; the sun nukes the bitumen when the Principal’s voice crackles through the PA.
“Kamala Harris and Tim Walz can you please report to the Principal’s office, immediately!”
“Sticks and stones may break our bones,” Tim sulks, “and turns out, those names did hurt the school bully!” he says as they death march down the school hall.
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“So? What did you call him?” The Principal glares, as they shuffle nervously into her office.
“We called him …” Kamala stammers, “We called him … weird.”
The Principal shakes her head in disappointment.
“He started it!” whines Kamala.
In the real world there is no Principal to tell Kamala and her running mate Timmy that they are “better than this!”
Instead, these bunch of mouthy school kids are war-gaming the best Trump take-downs, in the hope it fast-tracks them into the highest office, the White House.
It’s worked, they have landed on a word that has become the ultimate take-down of the 2024 US election.
Weird.
It is weird, that the word weird has now been weaponised and the Democrats cannot lob this four-letter bomb out fast enough. It’s become their catch-cry against all things Trumpublican.
It’s true, Timmy started it.
Newly appointed Presidential running mate — Tim Walz first used the word weird in a simple but scathing review of the Republican Party.
“These guys are just weird,” he said in a video that has been now replayed countless times. He backed it up in another interview by adding their policies are “weird” too.
Suddenly, the Democrats had a clap back that could stick. After years of sitting around with wheat biscuits and weak coffee reading manuals on “Trolling Light”, all while weathering Trumped up insults, “Crooked Hillary! Sleepy Joe! Crazy Nancy!” They finally had a breakthrough.
Weird just works.
Its ambiguity — its strength.
Harris’ campaign X account has called Trump weird at least a dozen times and any Democrat within arm’s reach of a microphone is now peppering their points with it. It’s fast becoming the democratic version of a punctuation mark.
Talking trash is by no means new.
I am sure there are stick figure examples on cave walls, neanderthals calling each other bone heads back in 130,000 BC.
Some of our greatest ancient minds — Pericles, Cato, Cicero — roasted the proverbial crap out of rivals and enemies.
Even The Iliad serves up a mighty sledge, as Achilles spews out: “You are a bloated drunk, with a dog’s face and a deer’s heart.” I don’t know why he had to drag the poor deer into it, but you can see why Disney felt the need to give Bambi a rebranding glow up.
I don’t have the word count in this article to go through Trump’s name-calling.
Put it this way, The New York Times tried to maintain a list of People, Places and Things Trump has insulted on Twitter … by May 2019 they ran out of resources to keep it up to date.
Some people love name-calling. Tell it like it is – how brave, how bold! It’s effective too, psychologists say it’s a sure-fire way to show power and create imbalance.
Others lament that this point in time marks the decline of civility, the lost art of speaking, and fading decorum in the public space. That instead of talking about policies, we are spending precious moments analysing which roast packs the mightiest punch.
Weird might be the tagline of the 2024 US election but will this rhetoric be enough to spark a come from behind victory for the Democrats?
Maybe ….
Politics is weird.
