US Democrats have spent recent days trying out a relatively new attack line on Donald Trump: that he is weird. The tactic is almost certainly calibrated to resonate with young and independent voters who, polls show, are moving from marked lack of interest in the now-dropped matchup between Joe Biden and his presidential predecessor to engagement in the 100-day contest between Trump and Kamala Harris.
In a press release on Thursday, the vice-president and presumptive Democratic nominee, Kamala Harris, issued a list of the main takeaways of what Trump had given the American people. “Is Donald Trump OK?” the X message said. The seventh of nine entries was: “Trump is old and quite weird?”
At a fundraising event in Massachusetts on Saturday, Harris tried out the line again, describing what Trump and running mate JD Vance had been saying about her as “just plain weird”.
“I mean that’s the box you put that in,” Harris said after Trump had called her “a bum” the previous day and Vance disparaged her in 2021 as a “childless cat (lady)”.
The Harris campaign, working to redefine the race with particular attention to the youth vote, including colorizing online HarrisHQ banners lime green after Charli xcx’s “brat” endorsement, has sought to draw attention to Trump’s rally storytelling. Particularly, they have highlighted his frequent references to the fictional serial killer Hannibal Lecter of The Silence of the Lambs fame as well as the choice between being shocked by a sinking electric boat or being eaten by a shark.
But “weird” is what seems to be sticking, in part as an apparent simplification of warnings about the threat to democracy that Trump poses – which dominated 15 months of Biden’s re-election campaign.
Minnesota’s Democratic governor, Tim Walz, appears to have started the “weird” political trendline. He posted on X, “Say it with me: Weird,” in response to a video of Trump speaking about Lecter. Walz later followed up with “these guys are weird” to describe Trump and Vance.
During a Sunday appearance on CNN’s State of the Union, Walz was asked if “weird” had replaced existential threat to democracy as a more effective attack strategy. The retired high school educator and football coach replied: “It’s an observation because being a schoolteacher I see a lot of things.”
Walz added that a second Trump presidency could indeed put women’s lives at risk over reproductive rights after three of his US supreme court appointees helped eliminate federal abortion rights in 2022. He also said Trump could end other constitutional liberties – but musing about his embodiment of a threat to democracy “gives him way too much power”, Walz argued.
“Listen to the guy. He’s talking about Hannibal Lecter and shocking sharks and whatever crazy thing pops into his mind,” Walz said.
“I think we give him way too much credit. If you just ratchet down some of the scariness and just name it what it is. Have you seen the guy laugh? It seems very weird to me that an adult can go through six and a half years of being in the public eye and when he laughs it’s at someone – not with them.
“That’s very weird behavior,” Walz explained on State of the Union. “I don’t think you call it anything else. It’s simply what we’re observing.”
The US transport secretary, Pete Buttigieg, also an outside contender for Harris’s vice-president pick, tried a slightly amended line, telling Fox News that Trump is “clearly older and stranger than when America first got to know him”.
The 78-year-old Trump’s campaign, he added, had maintained its candidate “is strong as an ox, leaps tall buildings in … bounds, but we don’t have that kind of warped reality on our side”.
“I’m pretty sure voters are worried about the age and acuity of President Trump compared to Kamala Harris, who represents being a generation younger,” Buttigieg said. “And how could anybody not watch the stuff he’s saying, the rambling on the trail, and not be just a little bit concerned?”
The new Democratic line on Trump comes after several days of criticism aimed at Vance not only about the “childless cat” lady comment – but also because of reportedly resurfaced comments calling Trump “morally reprehensible” and expressing his hatred for police officers, who generally enjoy the support of Republicans.
The Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, described Vance’s selection as an “incredibly bad choice” to CBS’s Face the Nation on Sunday, adding that the Ohio Republican senator “seems to be more erratic and more extreme than President Trump”.
“I’ll bet President Trump is sitting there scratching his head and wondering, why did I pick this guy? The choice may be one of the best things he ever did for Democrats,” Schumer said.
The developments come as a new ABC News/Ipsos poll on Sunday found that Harris’s favorability rating had jumped to 43% from 35% a week earlier. It found a major jump in her favorability rating among electorally crucial independent voters, with 44% saying they viewed her favorably compared with 28% the previous week.
Also significant is the 59-year-old Harris’s numbers within the swing group of “double haters” – voters who liked neither Biden nor Trump. Within that group, the number who liked neither candidate has dropped from 15% to 7%.
