Sure, Donald Trump is a threat to democracy — a would-be dictator on day one who has called for terminating the U.S. Constitution so he can hold onto power even after losing a free and fair election. But while draped in the rhetoric of populism, Trump and his MAGA movement are not actually popular; the man himself has never won more votes than the person he ran against, a majority of Americans twice rejecting him and his off-putting cult of personality. That he was ever president is more or less because a few thousand swing voters in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania thought it would be fun.
President Joe Biden won in 2020 largely by promising to a return to normalcy and baseline competency. In 2024, Democrats are making a similar argument but more forcibly: They’re pointing, laughing and dismissing Trump and his circus as a total freak show to which we can’t return.
“The fascists depend on fear,” as Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz put it over the weekend. “The fascists depend on us going back. But we are not afraid of weird people. We’re a little bit creeped out, but we are not afraid.”
Walz, currently being vetted as a potential running mate for Vice President Kamala Harris, came out of nowhere and, in a series of TV appearances over the last two weeks, effectively crafted Democrats’ latest messaging on Trump and his new sidekick, Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio. The Republican ticket is a pair of odd dudes: one, 78, is visibly declining and rambling about whatever enters into his mind before a crowd of people wearing diapers and oversized t-shirts with his face on it, while the other, 39, is having fights with America's sweetheart, Jennifer Aniston, while seeming like a guy who'd corner you at a party to talk about "this trans stuff" and birth rates in Europe.
They’re strange guys with sick obsessions, as the two-term Democratic governor and former congressman put it on MSNBC last week.
“You know there’s something wrong with people when they talk about freedom — freedom to be in your bedroom, freedom to be in your exam room, freedom to tell your kids what they can read,” Walz said. “That stuff is weird. They come across as weird. They seem obsessed with this.”
After nearly a decade of being forced to take the host of “The Apprentice” seriously, Democrats are increasingly calling “bulls**t” on the whole charade. Trump is not a normal opponent who one should (or can) engage in a high-minded debate about tariffs and industrial policy. He’s a clown: scary, but often sad and ultimately a joke.
Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, appearing Sunday on Fox News, contrasted the Republican devotion to a lie — that Trump is coherent, a respectable role model for children, and the winner of the 2020 election — with Democrats’ willingness to acknowledge that Biden was no longer the party’s best candidate in November.
Republicans, including Fox News anchors, “will take a look at Donald Trump and say he’s perfectly fine, even though he seemed unable to tell the difference between Nikki Haley and Nancy Pelosi; even though he’s rambling about electrocuting sharks and Hannibal Lecter; even though he’s clearly older and stranger than he was when America got to know him,” Buttigieg said. “They say he’s strong as an ox, leaps tall buildings in a single bound. We don’t have that kind of warped reality on our side.”
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Republicans are out of step with a clear majority of Americans. They are, bluntly, the party of mobs yelling at school board meetings about books and teachers making kids gay; they are the party that has three times now nominated a demagogue from a reality TV show to lead the country — and Democrats, representing more than half the country on everything from abortion to LGBTQ+ rights to whether poor children should be fed, are finally pointing out how bizarre it all is.
That it’s working is evident in how openly Republicans hate it, the party that runs against every resident of a big city and wanted to toss out 81 million votes so a reality star could own the libs and be king — which dismisses the Democratic candidate as a “DEI hire” — now decrying Democrats’ nasty lack of decorum.
“This whole ‘they’re weird’ argument from the Democrats is dumb [and] juvenile,” Vivek Ramaswamy, a Republican billionaire, posted on X. “This is a presidential election, not a high school prom queen contest.”
Democrats, Ramaswamy kindly recommended, should instead be running on “policy.” And sure: Democrats should emphasize their popular commitment to restoring reproductive freedom in the world’s strongest economy. But they’re not about to take advice about messaging from someone who would like them to lose.
The Harris campaign, if anything, is leaning into what works. In a press release over the weekend, addressing a “78-year-old criminal’s Fox News appearance,” the vice president’s staff noted Trump’s failed attempt to distance himself from his ally’s hard-right Project 2025 agenda. But there was also a fact that the campaign did not want reporters to miss: the man with 34 felony convictions to his name is also “old and quite weird.”
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