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.
It makes sense. You can’t reason with it, you can’t use descriptive accurate language because they might not understand, or fail to understand why it applies to them.
Weird - to them - means “non-conforming” and that is a terrible, terrible thing for a conservative.
More than just non-conforming generally too. They super quickly embraced that non-conformist image when it came to the masks.
But it feels like just calling them weird triggers a primal fear within them that they’re not really part of the “in-group” after all. It works where other insults don’t because they can’t easily write it off as their enemies simply being jealous of how cool they are basically.