How Trump and Vance went from a ‘threat to democracy’ to ‘weird’

In the days since Vice President Kamala Harris has taken over the campaign against former President Donald Trump and his running mate JD Vance, Democrats are leaning into a new attack line against the Republican ticket: that they're just really weird.

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz , a potential Harris running mate who’s been using this description for months, said it during his first viral TV appearance of the week, and then in others. The Democratic Governors Association, which Walz leads, amplified it on social media. And the Harris campaign has adopted it as well, incorporating the label repeatedly this week in press releases and posts on X and TikTok.

As this simple and quintessentially Midwestern description of Trump and Vance catches on, it marks a notable rhetorical shift — away from Biden's apocalyptic, high-minded messaging toward a more gut-level vernacular that may better capture how many voters react to far-right rhetoric of the kind Vance in particular trades in.

“It perfectly describes the uneasiness people feel. It’s how people who don’t live and breathe politics every day react to hearing the Republican vice presidential candidate denigrate people without children,” said Tim Hogan, a Democratic strategist who worked on the 2020 presidential campaign of another Minnesotan, Sen. Amy Klobuchar. “It’s simple. It’s how you might talk to your neighbor about the crazy political climate we’re living in.”

Walz’s post of his interview clip on X — captioned: “I’m telling you: these guys are weird.” — had 4.6 million views as of Friday afternoon. And when the Harris campaign sent out a memo on Thursday responding to Trump, or what they described as “a 78-Year-Old Criminal’s Fox News Appearance,” they included this among a list of takeaways: “Trump is old and quite weird?”

And on Friday, the Harris campaign used the term in multiple press releases. One focused on Vance’s anti-abortion stance, which called him “creepy” in the subject line, began with a simple declaration: “JD Vance is weird.” That followed another release highlighting negative coverage of Trump’s running mate in which Harris campaign spokesperson Serafina Chitika asserted that Vance had “spent all week making headlines for his out-of-touch, weird ideas.”

And others are picking up the cues. Sens. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) and Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) posted a video on X reacting to Vance’s past comments about limiting the political power of Americans who don’t have children, which Murphy called “a super weird idea.” Schatz then chimed in to underscore the point: “It’s quite weird, but it’s also offensive.”

Harris replacing President Joe Biden atop the Democratic ticket has rejuvenated the party, triggering an avalanche of enthusiasm, endorsements and energy around a more competitive candidate. And as her campaign apparatus reshapes itself to adapt to her profile, it is adjusting its messaging strategy using the template Walz and others have provided — to talk about Trump and Vance in a different, more relatable way.

“Joe Biden, president of the United States and 81-year-old man, can’t authentically call his opposition ‘weird.’ And his campaign’s tone reflected his,” said Amanda Litman, co-founder of Run for Something, a progressive group that recruits young people to run for office. “It’s definitely a younger [tone], but I think it’s more about being free from the obligation to speak in Biden’s voice.”

Biden and his senior adviser Mike Donilon, who conceptualized nearly every one of Biden’s TV ads, both believed deeply in making the issue of democracy a central theme of the campaign. But the president’s remarks on the subject often featured a grave tone and a heaviness that, more than three years after the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection, the country had seemingly tuned out. Polls showed voters rated Biden and Trump roughly evenly on questions of which candidate would be better to protect democracy.

Suddenly, there’s no more talk of “inflection points” or saving “the soul of the nation.” No exhortations from on high to “meet this moment of national and generational importance.”

The Harris campaign’s first digital video, released Thursday, featured a Beyoncé soundtrack and a more subtle tweak to the democracy message that had been central to Biden’s vision, reframed around a more optimistic vision of freedom. And in her own speeches since taking over, she has cast Trump through her own lens, referencing her career as a prosecutor who’s taken on perpetrators of matching transgressions: "Predators who abused women, fraudsters who ripped off consumers, cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain," she said on Monday during remarks at her campaign’s Wilmington, Delaware, headquarters. "So hear me when I say, I know Donald Trump’s type."

That more relaxed, more conversational approach to describing Trump mirrors the way Walz and others have successfully attacked the former president and other Republican candidates who’ve made themselves in his image, defining them as outside the bounds of normalcy.

During the 2022 midterms, Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.), who is, like Walz, being vetted by Harris’ team as a potential running mate, summed up his GOP challenger, Blake Masters, with one devastating debate line.

“I think we all know guys like this,” Kelly said of Masters. “You know, guys that think they know better than everyone about everything. You know, you think you know better than women and doctors about abortion. You even think you know better than seniors about Social Security.”

Describing Trump and Vance as “weird” also serves as something of a catch-all, given the former president’s penchant for vicious personal attacks, incendiary language and off-topic riffs about Hannibal Lecter, shower head pressure and the comparative dangers of electric boats and sharks. It allows Democrats to characterize Vance’s own controversial statements about “childless cat ladies” — and to even nod at other, stranger memes shooting around the internet — without going into the details or even referencing them directly.

Indeed, Vance’s “childless cat ladies” drew a rebuke from actress Jennifer Aniston, who rarely weighs in on politics.

“Using new words gets people’s attention. [It’s] so easy to tune out the political language,” said Democratic strategist Martha McKenna. The “weird” label, she added, fits not just the candidates but the broader MAGA movement. “It’s the first word that came to mind when I saw the white bandages on the ears of delegates at the RNC: ‘That’s weird.’”

Tagging MAGA as “weird” started for Walz during a series of keynote speeches at state party dinners in Kansas, Indiana, Nebraska and North Dakota, where the description drew big laughs and knowing nods from Midwesterners, according to one of the governor’s aides. He first used the term with the press in an interview with POLITICO eight months ago as he took over as chair of the Democratic Governors Association.

But it was his appearance on MSNBC’s Morning Joe on Tuesday, which was watched with heightened interest given Harris’ reported interest in him as a potential running mate, where the line really caught his party’s attention.

“These guys are just weird,” the former school teacher said, drawing audible chuckles from an off-air Joe Scarborough. “They’re running for, like, ‘He-Man Women Hater’s Club’ or something. That's what they’re doing. That’s not what people are interested in.”

Hours later during another MSNBC appearance, Walz said it again. “These are weird people on the other side,” he said. “They want to take books away. They want to be in your exam room. That’s what it comes down to. Don’t go sugarcoating this — these are weird ideas.”

It’s a natural one-liner for a politician who, before running for Congress in the Democratic wave years of 2006, spent his career inside a school cafeteria and on a high school football field. Beyond his suburban dad energy, Walz’s description of MAGA Republicans, ironically enough, carries the same cutting simplicity and plain-spokenness as some of Trump’s most effective barbs and opponent-defining nicknames.

The DGA under Walz has recently trotted out ‘weird’ in its TikToks, fundraising emails and even created a graphic with the quote for social media posts. An SMS message this week featuring the “weird” quote is already the organization’s best performing text from the Minnesota governor.

Litman, the Run for Something co-founder, argued it’s a more effective messaging strategy: “People understand ‘weird’ more intuitively than, say, ‘threat to democracy.’”