Donald Trump appeared to say that his running mate, Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH), isn’t weird because he’s “so straight.”
Trump was speaking at a town hall event in LaCross, Wisconsin, yesterday with former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii when he discussed how the Harris-Walz campaign has been calling Republicans – and especially Vance – “weird.”
“They picked this guy,” Trump said, referring to Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D), who has been vocal about calling Vance and Trump weird. “He is weird! Right? I’m not weird, he’s weird.”
“No, he’s a weird guy, he’s a weird dude,” Trump continued. “You know, they come up with soundbites, they always have soundbites, and one of the things is that J.D. and I are weird.”
Then Trump defended himself and Vance from the weird charges, calling Vance “so straight” and a “top student.”
“This guy is so straight? J.D. is so… He’s doing a great job, smart, top student, great guy, he’s not weird and I’m not weird. I mean, we’re a lot of things, we’re not weird.”
Totally straight and not weird.
It’s honestly hilarious how badly being called “weird” gets under their skin.
Like, normal people are pretty weird. If someone called me weird, I’d be like “Yeah, true.” But these guys are so out there that they feel a need to deny their own weirdness so that people can identify with them. It’s just weird, TBH.
This ticket is steeped in a toxicity that wants to be masculine but is not, and a deeply rooted misogyny.
It’s like the quote attributed to Atwood says, that what men fear from women is that they will laugh at them. This “weird” label hits a little too close to that for them to handle.
It’s fantastic. And so obvious.
One of the key features of authoritarian follower personalities is that they’re desperate to be normal. Like, they’re terrified of the idea that they’re not just like everyone else despite the fact that they are big weirdos. People who are afraid of being weird, or who get weirdly judgemental about weirdness, is a big red flag for me, personally.
Yea. Their entire structure of “give me power to fix your problems” quickly falls apart if people start to wonder whether the solutions will be ones they can empathize with or not.
They’re sort of operating in this “I am your warrior” framework, making it seem like people are empowering one of their own, themselves, basically, to fix their own problems. That whole thing requires the chosen champion to be “one of them” though.
I’ve been called weird my whole life. The only ways to handle that are to betray your own nature, or to own it.
“Yeah, and the weirder I got, the more your mother liked it.”
They honestly have spent their whole lives either wanting to define what is weird and/or associating with a set of people they think get to define what is weird.
It’s an obsession with the conservative brain, I think. You could tell who many of these people were when they were in kindergarten or first grade. They could not STAND any kind of deviation from what they (or their parents, etc.) thought was a “normal” thing. So they’d yell taunts at anyone eating “weird” food", or taking up “weird” hobbies, watching “weird” TV/movies, or looking to take up a “weird” employment track, or they went to a “weird” church (or not at all, or - gasp - were going to some other building that was not a xtian church) and so on.
They defined themselves this way. And to have this turned around on them all so suddenly and uniformly. To be fair, people like Seth Meyers have been calling donOLD and friends weird for a very long time. It’s just now the Democrats found some people with some goddamn spine and a platform to keep saying it and not apologizing for it. The Republicans ARE very weird. They spend their time obsessing over “murdered babies” (zygotes), where trans people poop, what gay men might be doing in the privacy of their own bedrooms, what religious doctrine other people may or may not follow, and so on. These are very deeply weird obsessions in a FREE country.
Free country means I and anyone else has freedom FROM their weird obsessions, including their little book club. I don’t ever have to GAF about what they say their Jehovah/Yahweh/Allah (all same thing) says, because I have freedom FROM religion, just as they have freedom OF religion and can choose to stay in the religion they were likely born into.
It’s because that used to be their code word for gay, trans, queer (basically anybody that doesn’t fit in their view of society) before they decided that woke worked better.
They’ve been using weird as a soft-insult for a decades.
Human existence in general is pretty weird. The “normal” state of affairs for humanity is being weird. We’re just all individually weird. So to deny that they’re weird, is actually kind of weird in and of itself.
There is “good weird” and “bad weird”. They are specifically being called bad weird. They aren’t the weird that is made of odd people, with personality quarks, that make them unusual, eccentric, and possibly interesting. They are fucking creeps.
Vance is the creepy kind of weird that wants to spy on women and track their periods.
Listen, I NEED to see your genitals. I NEED to know about your menstrual cycle, in detail. I NEED to know about your sex life. This isn’t weird, it isn’t creepy, this is about SAFETY and saving CHILDREN!