Former President Donald Trump has taken aim at the media for what he describes as an abrupt focus on the term “weird” in relation to him and his running mate, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio). In a podcast interview on “The Clay Travis and Buck Sexton Show,” accused the media of amplifying the term and framing the Republican ticket in a negative light.
“Nobody’s ever called me weird,” Trump confidently declared. “They’re the weird ones,” Trump asserted, referring to Harris and Democrats. “I’m a lot of things, but weird I’m not.” He was quick to extend this bizarre defense to his running mate, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), who, according to Trump, is “not at all” weird.
The Republican ticket has recently become the target of Democratic criticisms branding them as “weird”—a surprising twist from the Biden campaign’s usual focus on Trump’s threat to democracy.
Trump insisted that the real weirdness lay with the Democrats’ stances on issues like immigration, taxes, transgender rights, and elections. “The whole thing is weird,” he proclaimed, as if navigating these topics was the true hallmark of normalcy.
“It’s all a soundbite,” the former president continued, lamenting how the media seems to latch onto the word ‘weird.’ “You notice… the evening news, every one of ‘em’s talking, they introduce the word ‘weird,’ and all of a sudden they’re talking about ‘weird.’”
“No, we’re not weird people,” Trump insisted with a straight face. “We’re actually just the opposite; we’re right down the middle.”
Vice President Harris’s campaign, having recently picked up on the “weird” critique first introduced by Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D), responded with a flair for the dramatic. Harris herself had quipped last weekend at a fundraiser, “You may have noticed Donald Trump has been resorting to some wild lies about my record. And some of what he and his running mate are saying, it’s just plain weird. I mean, that’s the box you put that in, right?”
An email from Harris’s campaign also couldn’t resist pointing out that the former president “is old and quite weird.”
In response to the “weird” attack, Vance has said that “it’s an honor” being attacked as weird.
“Look, the price of admission — meaning, the price of getting to serve the people of this country — is the Democrats are going to attack us with everything that they have. I think it’s an honor,” Vance said in a recent Fox News interview, seeming to take pride in the weirdness label.
Trump, not one to miss an opportunity to return the favor, labeled Harris as “plain weird” during a recent interview with Fox News’ Laura Ingraham. “Listen, this whole thing is a con job. ‘Just plain weird.’ Do you know who is plain weird? She’s plain weird,” Trump said. “She’s a weird person. Look at her past. Look at what she does.”
In this surreal political season, it seems the only thing truly peculiar is the lengths to which Trump will go to claim the mantle of normalcy.
