STRANGER Things

The Democrats' short hot summer of "weird"

- Kase Wickman

THE 2024 PRESIDENTIAL election is shaping up to be the weirdest in history—just ask Democratic political operatives. The party of “they go low, we go high” has asterisked that slogan: This year, they go low, we go side-eye.

Yes, the left’s latest talking point has emerged, and it’s passive-aggressive and petty as hell: Those Republicans are straight-up weird.

On July 25 the campaign for Kamala Harris, whose brand-new presidential bid was off to a running start, said the quiet thing loud in a press release reacting to an interview Republican nominee Donald Trump gave to Fox News: “Trump is old and quite weird.”

This was just one of the takeaways in the release, titled “Statement on a 78-Year-Old Criminal’s Fox News Appearance,” pointing out Trump’s erratic and flustered behavior and positing that “when Trump wasn’t lying, he was making threats.” Another bullet point read, “This guy shouldn’t be president ever again.”

Harris has been beating the weird drum since at least 2018, when, CNN reported, she was confronted with the idea of debating Trump in a hypothetical 2020 run. During prep, she pondered how she’d respond if Trump reprised how he had behaved during his debate with Hillary Clinton in 2016, stalking back and forth and lurking over her shoulder.

Harris said she’d simply turn around and ask him, “Why are you being so weird?”

It’s now the Democrats’ jibe of choice toward the opposition.

Jesse Lee, a former senior official in the Obama-Biden White House, tells Vanity Fair that the revived messaging matches the candidate.