In recent weeks, Democrats have increasingly been calling Republicans “weird,” and the label might be starting to grate on them.
Former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy complained about the name-calling on Sunday.
“This whole ‘they’re weird’ argument from the Democrats is dumb & juvenile,” Ramaswamy, who owns a portion of BuzzFeed, HuffPost’s parent company, wrote on social media.
“This is a presidential election, not a high school prom queen contest,” he wrote. “It’s also a tad ironic coming from the party that preaches ‘diversity & inclusion.’ Win on policy if you can, but cut the crap please.”
Democrats in Congress have occasionally called Republicans “weird” in the past few weeks, but surrogates for Vice President Kamala Harris, now the party’s presumptive presidential nominee, have amplified the message as the election enters a 100-day countdown.
The Harris campaign described former President Donald Trump, the GOP nominee, as “old and quite weird” in a press release last week. In a separate release, it described his running mate, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), as “weird” and “a creep.”
“Assigning extra votes to certain people based on the size of their family is weird,” Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) wrote Sunday on X, formerly Twitter, describing a policy idea Vance once suggested. “Banning library books is weird. Government being in people’s bedroom is weird. Government being in the exam room is weird.”
“Saying ‘weird’ is not a schoolyard taunt ― it’s an observation,” the senator added.
“Weird” is a far more lighthearted attack than other rhetoric that President Joe Biden, before he ended his reelection campaign, used to describe Trump, whom he called a wannabe “dictator” and a “threat to democracy.” Some Republicans blamed the rhetoric for the assassination attempt against Trump earlier this month, though no evidence has emerged that the shooter was paying attention to what the campaigns were saying.
The highest-profile booster of Democrats’ “weird” attack might be Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, a potential Harris running mate who has been making frequent media appearances.
“These are weird people on the other side,” Walz said on MSNBC last week. “They want to take books away, they want to be in your [medical] exam room … Don’t get sugarcoating this. These are weird ideas.”
“Listen to the guy,” Walz said in a separate interview on CNN over the weekend, referring to Trump. “He’s talking about Hannibal Lecter and shocking sharks and just whatever crazy thing pops into his mind … Have you ever seen the guy laugh? That seems very weird to me, that an adult can go through six and a half years of being in the public eye. If he has laughed, it’s at someone, not with someone. That is weird behavior.”
But the Harris campaign didn’t invent “weird” as a slam on Republicans ― it’s a word other rank-and-file Democrats have used to describe Trump and his allies.
“He’s just gonna have a bunch of creepy weirdos working in the White House that are intent on destroying government from the inside and pursuing their super creepy, weird political agendas,” Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) told reporters in June.
Some Republicans, too, use the W-word. Vance, in an interview Friday about his past critique of Democrats as “childless cat ladies,” said that leftist rhetoric in favor of remaining child-free is “profoundly weird and dangerous.” He followed that up with a post on X the next day.
“It’s almost like these people don’t want young people starting families or something,” Vance wrote, commenting on a video of Harris describing “climate anxiety” and fear of the future. “Really weird stuff.”
The National Republican Senatorial Committee also highlighted what it called Harris’ “weird” qualities in a memo last week, including her laughter, her love of Venn diagrams, and her affinity for electric school buses.
On Monday, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) responded to Ramaswamy’s gripe about being called weird.
“Being obsessed with repressing women is goofy. Trying to watch what LGBTQ+ people do all the time is abnormal. Punishing people who don’t have biological offspring is creepy,” she wrote. “It’s an incel platform, dude. It’s SUPER weird. And people need to know.”
