Democrats' attacks on Donald Trump and his running mate J.D. Vance as “weirdos” continue to irritate the former president, prompting Trump on Monday to say he and Vance are “very normal people” during an event to promote his economic plan in York, Pennsylvania.
“You can see it a little bit with this crazy guy. He said we're weird, J.D. and I are weird. I think we're very normal people. Just like you… He's weird,” Trump said, in an apparent reference to vice presidential nominee Tim Walz.
Last month, Walz, the governor of Minnesota, began calling Republicans “weird” during a series of hit TV shows. “You know there’s something wrong with people when they talk about freedom: freedom to be in your bedroom, freedom to be in an exam room, freedom to tell your kids what they can read,” he said in an interview with MSNBC. “These things are weird.”
The line of attack has resonated widely. At her first fundraiser since becoming the presumptive nominee, Kamala Harris said Trump “tells wild lies about my record, and some of what he and his running mate are saying is just bizarre.” Harris then chose Walz as her running mate, and now the campaign regularly describes Republican opposition to her as “bizarre”—for everything from making awkward jokes about Diet Mountain Dew to trying to curtail Americans’ rights.
Trump and Vance were on the defensive. “We’re ordinary people who want to make this country great again,” Vance said earlier this month.
This line also bothers Trump. A source who speaks regularly with Trump previously said: Rolling Stone“Of course he’s upset about it. The Democrats and the media are demonizing this good guy who came out of nowhere as some kind of weirdo.”
Trump also raised the issue during a press conference last week. “She called me weird. He’s weird. It was just a short sentence. She called me and J.D. weird. He’s not weird,” Trump said of Harris and Walz. “He’s a weird guy, and she’s a weirdo in her politics.”
But the “I know you are, but who am I?” approach doesn’t seem to have worked well for Trump and Vance. “So far, at least, Trump and Vance haven’t been able to come up with an effective response,” David Karpf, a professor of strategic communications at George Washington University, told the Associated Press last month.
On Sunday, the day before the Democratic National Convention began, the Democratic National Committee displayed an image titled “Trump-Vance: ‘Weird as Hell’” on the side of the Trump International Hotel and Tower in Chicago.
