Weird.
Democrats think they found a word to discredit Trump: "Weird."
Trump isn't "weird."
Trump is a "malevolent narcissist."
Minnesota Governor Tim Walz called Trump "weird," and it is circulating among young adult voters, the people who have picked up lime green as a team color.
Walz performed one of the jobs of a vice presidential candidate, being an attack-dog critic of the opponent. He is on the very short list of potential running mates for Kamala Harris.
Weird is the wrong word. Weird is offbeat. Unconventional. It is independent, and often in a good way. Senatorial candidate John Fetterman was weird, in his shorts and hoodie. It was a happy, sloppy, comfortable "everyman" look. It was a net positive for him.
Ten years ago, back when Portland, Oregon, was the best city on the west coast -- before the riots and homeless tents -- the phrase "Keep Portland Weird" was a point of local pride.
Trump goes far beyond "weird" into manic lunacy. Trump is sick. He doesn't drink, but he acts like a man with a drinking problem, a belligerent drunk. Trump types out ALL CAP ravings, sometimes of catastrophe, sometimes of anger that fellow Republicans are disloyal, most often of wild claims of his own brilliance. and anger at the perfidy of others. These are just in from last night:
We read about Donald Trump in high school when we were assigned to read Moby Dick. Remember Captain Ahab? Remember reading about his mono-mania that nearly got everyone killed? Trump is Captain Ahab.
Trump lacks self-awareness and self-control. Yesterday's Easy Sunday short post urged Trump to "keep talking," as he used his time and audience in Atlanta to bash the popular Republican governor and to insist, against all evidence, that he deserved to win the 2020 Georgia election and that the state's governor and election officials owed it to him to cheat on his behalf. How self-destructive. Even Republican partisans admit it. Trump is his own worst enemy.
He goes off script to serve his mania. At some point a Trump feature becomes a Trump bug. A courageous ambition to win, win, win, becomes a sick inability to recognize reality.
George Conway is promoting PsychoPAC, a group that defines and creates advertisements describing Trump's behavior. Conway notes that the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the DSM-5, has a description of acknowledged diseases. One of these is narcissistic personality disorder. Five or more behaviors confirm a diagnosis of the condition. These include grandiose sense of self-importance, fantasies of power and brilliance, a belief one is special or unique, a need for excessive admiration, a sense of entitlement, being interpersonally exploitative, a lack of empathy, enviousness, and arrogance. Conway observes Trump has them all.
One does not need to "medicalize" Trump. One can simply look and observe that Trump is acting out of control. He is manic. He is lashing out. His repeated claims that Harris has "low IQ" -- now that she is Black in his eyes -- comes across as unsubtle racist dog whistling. Would any prudent person choose Trump to be a trustee for one's estate in light of his convictions for fraudulent and self-dealing business practices? Would any reader of this blog in a position as a board member of a business or nonprofit organization hire someone with Trump's history and current behavior to be a school superintendent, a hospital director, a park department manager, a college dean, or even the branch manager of a 7-11 corner store? Trump would be a time bomb.The red flags are waving.
Biden was diminished by age. Democrats acknowledged it and dealt with it. Trump is diminished by some combination of age and personality disorders, and the condition has gotten worse. Republicans had options, but they stuck with Trump, warts and all.
Now that Biden is gone, Trump's warts are center stage. And worse yet, Trump is showing them off.
There are plenty of terms to describe Orange and what has sadly become of the once grand old party... criminal, rapist, traitor, crap husband, crap father, crap human. Weird, as you note, Peter, can often have an amusing or quirky edge and there is nothing about the former president that is either of those things.
But "weird" is also a nearly entirely inoffensive term that encapsulates a whole range of oddity and worse. And there is no doubt that since 2015 when Bozo floated down an elevator and into electoral politics, our entire national discussion has become strange, abnormal, weird. I applaud Walz and the Democratic party for landing on a stand-in term that captures all that. The former president is weird. He's many other things too, but weird is a great catch all and we all know just what it means, in this context.
He may not be weird but I am sure he hates being called weird. He is weird that way. :)