After nearly a decade of being forced to take Trump seriously, Democrats increasingly call BS on the whole charade
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.
Being weird is not an insult to us, we wear that hat with pride. But our weird behavior falls on one side of the “normalcy range”, the quirky, the funny, the confidently different, the queer side.
There is another side of “weird”, the side of creepy weird, the side of child predators, the side of tikki-torch nazis, the side of whatever the couch fuck is wrong with J.D. Vance. And they don’t wear that hat with pride, they wish they were normal or think of themselves as normal.
To the ones who hate us, who can’t stand our confident weirdness, and to the ones who are on the wrong side of weirdness, it’s an insult. That’s why we can be proudly weird, while they start foaming at the mouth at the mere implication that they might not be “normal”. That’s why this attack lands, they are the anti-queer, the anti-weird and pointing out that Trump behaves outside the accepted range of “normal” behavior (just in the opposite direction of our weird) is an effective attack.