Not even Laura Ingraham could help Donald Trump clean up after his running mate, J.D. Vance, insulted childless women. He “loves family,” Trump said in a Monday interview, adding, “I think a lot of people like family, and sometimes it doesn’t work out. And you know, you don’t meet the right person … You’re just as good, in many cases, a lot better than a person that’s in a family situation.” That comment won’t deter the Democratic Party from employing its favorite new line of attack: that Vance, Trump, and their allies are strange. As Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota and a leading candidate to be Kamala Harris’s vice-presidential nominee, put it on Saturday, “These guys are just weird.” The line has spread among Democratic leaders everywhere. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer called Vance “weird” and “erratic,” and Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg recently said the Republican senator is “odd.”
Is this a bit juvenile? Sure, but it also seems to be working. Trump is not the only conservative who seems at a loss about how to respond. On X, failed Republican presidential contender Vivek Ramaswamy posted, “This is a presidential election, not a high school prom queen contest. It’s also a tad ironic coming from the party that preaches ‘diversity & inclusion.’ Win on policy if you can, but cut the crap please.” Other conservatives responded to the “weird” accusations by getting even stranger. Helen Andrews, a senior editor at The American Conservative, posted, “Calling people ‘weird’ is such feminine behavior. Textbook sex difference: Men engage in open conflict; women police conformity. It’s honestly disorienting to hear male politicians use the line.” Democrats, said Matt Walsh of the Daily Wire, are “the party of cross dressing fetishists, mentally ill transgenders, naked degenerates exposing themselves to kids, hideous cartoonish drag queens who look like Tim Burton characters, etc etc.”
Still others gave Democrats new material to work with. “There is a sense in which the central purpose of every society is to figure out the distribution of women because women are valuable,” said Andrew Klavan on a July 26 broadcast of his Daily Wire show. “And women hate the idea that they can’t take care of themselves, but women cannot take care of themselves,” he added. “They’re smaller, weaker. Men are stronger. Men are mean. They’re more aggressive.” Rod Dreher, a right-wing writer who is a close friend of Vance, posted an image of the Olympic logo and said, “Emmanuel Macron’s decadent France has turned the Olympic rings into glory holes.” Because who doesn’t get turned on when they look at the Olympic flag?
None of this is normal, and voters know it. Most parents don’t have kids simply to own the libs or because they’re worried about getting outbred by immigrants. People are childless for many reasons, and none is Vance’s business. The contrast between Walz, a former teacher who seems to have a strong relationship with his family, and Vance, who has a family but often deploys fatherhood for partisan effect, could not be sharper or more damning for the right.
Conservatives have long staked out a claim to be the movement of traditional values, of families, of normal people, all in contrast to liberalism. The weirdness attack works so well because it flips that script and fights on important cultural terrain. It’s weird to care about how many children people have. It’s weird to treat women like incubators. It’s weird to care about people being drag queens. It’s weird to lose your shit because some people are trans. It’s weird to obsess over alleged sex differences. Most people aren’t like this and don’t want to be like this, either. The GOP has become the party of internet poisoning, and it’s important to say as much. Everyone likes to tell a freak to shut up.
The “weird” line does have its limitations, as the insult doesn’t fully capture the risk posed by conservative laws. It’s not just weird to force women to give birth; it’s an inherently misogynistic policy that damages women and families alike. Democrats also need a real vision for the country: a meaningful alternative to the right’s American freak show. Contra Ramaswamy, Democrats can say Vance is weird while they put out a strong message on reproductive rights and the economy, among other priorities. Nor must the attack extend to the “white, working-class, non-college-educated men and women” who “feel denigrated and humiliated by Democratic, liberal, college-educated elites,” as New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman claimed on Monday. So far, Democrats have restricted themselves to insulting Republican leaders, not voters; that’s as it should be.
Friedman also doesn’t grasp how effective this attack is proving to be. Any formerly weird child can attest to how difficult it is to shrug off this label. What are you going to do, put your fingers in your ears and chant “I’m not weird, you’re weird” until somebody eventually believes you? I was a little awkward in my day, and I know that’s not how things work. You can refute the attack only by not being weird — an idea that seems to elude many conservatives. They’ve left themselves few options. To address the attack, the bizarre right would have to reconstitute an entire movement, and that will take time and political will. Both are in short supply. Go on, then, and call the right weird, as long as it’s part of a bigger argument. Progress ought to be normal, and it’s worth fighting for, too.
