FILE PHOTO: Republican presidential candidate and former president Donald Trump holds his first rally with his running mate, Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio), in Grand Rapids, Michigan, July 20, 2024. REUTERS/Tom Brenner
Vice President Kamala Harris and her Democratic allies have highlighted new criticism of the Republican Party, blasting Donald Trump and his running mate, Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio, as “kooks.”
Democrats have been eager to apply the label in interviews and online, particularly in response to Vance’s comments on abortion and his previous comments that political leaders who don’t have biological children “don’t really have a direct stake in the country.”
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The “bizarre” messaging appeared to give Democrats a rhetorical advantage they rarely had when President Joe Biden was seeking reelection. The Trump campaign, which has often dictated the political debate with the former president’s rhetoric, has spent days trying to subvert that narrative by highlighting the Democrats’ alleged oddities.
“I don’t know who came up with this message, but I salute them,” said David Karpf, a professor of strategic communications at George Washington University.
Karpf said calling Republican remarks “weird” was the kind of succinct observation that quickly resonated with Harris’ supporters, but added that it “frustrates opponents, who then amplify that through their unbalanced responses.”
“So far, at least, Trump and Vance have not been able to come up with an effective response,” Karpf said.
Harris and her allies have used the term frequently.
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, a Democrat who is on Harris’ shortlist to be her running mate, called Trump and Vance “just weird” in an interview with MSNBC last week, a comment that was expanded on in an X post by the Democratic Governors Association, of which Walz is chairman. Waltz reiterated the comment on CNN on Sunday, noting Trump’s frequent references to fictional serial killer Hannibal Lecter from the film “Silence of the Lambs” in his street rallies.
In a news release following Trump’s Thursday appearance on Fox News, titled “Statement on 78-Year-Old Criminal Appearance on Fox News,” the Harris campaign wrote, among a list of bullet points, “Is Trump old and pretty nutty?”
The next day, multiple news releases from the Harris campaign similarly described her opponent, simply declaring that “J.D. Vance is weird,” in part because of his stance on abortion, with a Harris campaign spokesperson saying that Vance had “been in the news all week for his outlandish and bizarre ideas.”
Harris allies Sens. Brian Schatz of Hawaii and Chris Murphy of Connecticut posted a video on X on Friday calling Vance’s past comments about limiting the political power of childfree Americans a “very strange idea.”
And at her first fundraiser as a potential Democratic presidential candidate, Harris used the expression herself, blasting Trump’s “outrageous lies about my record and some of the things that he and his running mate are saying are just bizarre.”
“So that’s the box you put it in, right?” she added.
Many of the Democratic lawmakers’ comments seemed to allude to an interview with Vance in 2021, in which he slammed prominent Democrats who don’t have children, including Harris, as “childless catwomen” who have “no direct stake” in the United States.
But Harris’ own description of Trump as a “nut” may date back even further: In his 2021 book, political reporter Edward Isaac Dovere wrote that Harris was meeting with aides in 2018 to prepare for her own presidential run.
When staff tried to coach Harris on how she would react if Trump stood in front of her during a debate as he had done with 2016 Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, Harris reportedly joked, “I’d turn around and say, ‘Why are you acting so weird? What’s wrong with you?'”
The Trump campaign is trying to flip the script.
Trump spokesman Steven Chang on Sunday posted a video of Waltz calling Trump and Vance “wackos” during Harris’ campaign and saying the Democratic candidate and her supporters had gone too far in “trying to make everyone think this shooting was staged” — a reference to the assassination attempt at a Trump rally in Pennsylvania.
More broadly, some of Trump’s allies are trying to bring the debate back to Harris and her failed policy ideas.
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“You know what’s really bizarre? We have a politician like Kamala who’s soft on crime letting illegal immigrants out of prison so they can violently attack Americans,” the former president’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., asked on X on Monday.
On Saturday, Vance reposted an X-video shared by Trump Jr. in which Harris spoke about “climate anxiety — the fear of the future and the unknown of whether it even makes sense to think about having children.”
“It’s almost as if young people are reluctant to start families,” Vance wrote. “It’s really strange.”
Democrats are appropriating Republican attack lines to support Harris
Republicans have long tried to make the vice president look eccentric by sharing some of her laughs, jokes and anecdotes, most notably one she told last year in which her mother scolded her, saying, “You think you fell from a coconut tree?”
The “coconut tree” story itself has become a running joke within the Democratic Party since Ms. Harris took over the campaign, with many of her supporters fond of using a coconut emoji on their online accounts.
Calling Republicans “kooks” could be a way of making the GOP’s previous tactics their own, said Matt Sienkiewicz, a communications professor at Boston University.
Jacob Neiheisel, a professor of political communications at the University at Buffalo, compared the “bizarre” message to Arizona Sen. John McCain’s attempt in 2008 to portray Barack Obama as a celebrity with no substantive accomplishments.
“On a functional level, I think this may be part of a concerted attempt to defuse some of the longstanding efforts on the right to portray Harris as the same kind of person,” Neiheisel said.
