In 2016, Democrats taunted Donald Trump as “dangerous Donald.” In 2020, they moved on from dangerous to say that Trump’s Republican Party was a threat to the “soul of America.” Both messages — one relatively successful, one much less so — emphasized the threat that Trump posed to America and the world.
This year, as it mounts its third national campaign against Trump and his MAGA acolytes, the Democratic Party has abandoned the language of peril and danger in favor of something that is a little less heated.
Trump and JD Vance, Kamala Harris and her allies say, are “weird.”
It started with Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, now Harris’ running mate. Making the case against Trump and the Republican ticket in an interview on MSNBC, an almost bemused Walz said that the Republican Party was so outside the mainstream that it was off-putting to most Americans: “These are weird people on the other side. They want to take books away. They want to be in your exam room.”
Democrats immediately embraced Walz’s characterization of the former president and his running mate. Pete Buttigieg, the secretary of transportation, said Trump was getting “older and stranger.” Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania called Trump “weird” at a rally for Harris, as did Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York, who also said that Vance was “erratic.”
“Weird” doesn’t sound like much. But of all the attacks Democrats have levied against Republicans since Trump came down that escalator, this one appears to hit the hardest. Republican politicians seem taken aback by the idea that they’re outside the mainstream, by the charge that their interests and priorities are alienating to the average American.
Now, stepping back a bit, they shouldn’t be. The signature obsessions of Republican politics since 2020 — election denialism, book banning, abortion bans and the crusades against trans and other gender nonconforming people — are either unpopular with most Americans or electoral dead weight. Democrats in local, state and federal elections have scored win after win in opposition to these and similar preoccupations. In fact, if not for its commitment to this divisive, far-right cultural agenda, the Republican Party might have gotten the “red wave” of its dreams in the 2022 midterm elections.
Through all of this, Republicans still insist that they’re the party of normalcy. This is why they can’t quite deal with the charge that they’re weird. There’s a reason for this. For years, in the American political imagination, Republicans were the normal party and Democrats were the party of weirdness.
This was one of the major themes of the 1972 presidential election, when the Republican Party of Richard Nixon framed itself as the party of normalcy and of faith in America as it is. “It has become fashionable in recent years to point up what is wrong with what is called the American system,” Nixon declared at the Republican National Convention in Miami. “The critics contend it is so unfair, so corrupt, so unjust that we should tear it down and substitute something else in its place. I totally disagree. I believe in the American system.”
The Democratic Party of George McGovern was, in this narrative, the party of “acid, amnesty and abortion,” the party of chaos, disruption and overreach. Out of touch with the vast American middle, it had cast its lot with cultural elites and anti-war militants. This Democratic Party, said the Nixon campaign, could not relate to the tens of millions of ordinary, patriotic Americans who wanted nothing more than to live their lives in peace, far away from the dictates of “master planners in Washington” who “make decisions for people.”
Nixon did not just win reelection. He crushed the Democratic Party in a landslide victory that set the stage for two decades of liberal retreat, as Democrats ran as far and fast as they could away from the specter of McGovern. And while Nixon ended his presidency in disgrace, he still managed to give the Republican Party a set of images and ideas they could use against any Democrat who so much as looked in the direction of the left edge of their party.
Just over a decade later, Ronald Reagan would win another landslide victory for the Republican Party against a liberal and, it seemed, out-of-touch Democratic Party. It was settled: Republicans stood for the nation’s great majority, for normal people with normal families and normal views. Democrats, on the other hand, were, well, weird.
This is where things stood through the 1980s, 1990s and even the 2000s. The Republican case against Bill Clinton, a moderate Democrat who largely drew within the Reaganite political order, rested as much on Clinton as an alien to mainstream American values as it did on opposition to his priorities in Washington. Clinton, Republicans said, worked for McGovern, smoked weed and dodged the draft. His wife, they screamed, was a radical leftist.
Similarly, according to the Republican campaign to reelect George W. Bush in 2004, John Kerry was a disgraceful hippie turned effete and out-of-touch Massachusetts liberal. And four years later, Republicans tried, unsuccessfully, to paint Barack Obama as a dangerous radical who “pals around with terrorists” and takes instruction from anti-American religious leaders.
Through all of this, Democrats rarely tried to contest the notion that Republicans represented, in some sense, the mainstream of American society. The political press also took the idea that the Republican Party spoke to the so-called heartland of the United States for granted. Trump’s surprise victory in the 2016 presidential election — on the strength of narrow margins in a handful of postindustrial swing states — only enhanced the sense that Republicans were still the party of a silent majority, even if they hadn’t actually won a majority.
But a funny thing happened after Trump won. He purged the old-line Republicans and brought to prominence a new crop of far-right politicians, activists and media personalities who stood well outside the mainstream. As Trump strengthened his hold on the Republican Party, so too did these figures come to dominate conservative politics nationwide. Out with Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan; in with Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz.
Besides Trump, there is one other living former Republican president. There are three living former Republican vice presidents. There are any number of former high-ranking Republican officials, from Cabinet members to party leaders. Few, if any, were present at the Republican National Convention last month. Instead, when the Republicans gathered to nominate Trump a third time for the presidency of the United States, they marked the occasion with conservative celebrities, Silicon Valley reactionaries and a wide assortment of far-right extremists, culminating in the introduction of Sen. Vance as Trump’s running mate and heir apparent.
The Republican Party under Trump has fallen so far out of the political and cultural mainstream that the central aim of its most ambitious representatives and apparatchiks is to use the power of the state to bend that mainstream to their will.
In their minds, they’re only fighting back against a domineering cultural left. But the truth is that Republicans are alienating a large part of the American public and they just don’t see it.
And because they don’t see it, they’ve given Democrats an opportunity to do what Nixon did: to make their party the party of the silent majority and to define Republicans as one of the worst things a party can be in modern American politics.
Weird.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.