Thomas L.
Friedman Opinion
Columnist
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2024/07/22/opinion/thepoint#trump-democrats-weird
Democrats
Could Regret Calling Trump and His Supporters ‘Weird’
For a few
days this last week I started to believe that Kamala Harris and the Democrats
could come from behind and beat Donald Trump. But then I started to hear
Democrats patting themselves on the back for coming up with a great new label
for Trump Republicans. They are “weird.”
I cannot
think of a sillier, more playground, more foolish and more counterproductive
political taunt for Democrats to seize on than calling Trump and his supporters
“weird.”
But weird
seems to be the word of the week. As this newspaper reported, in a potential
audition to be Harris’s running mate, Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota said over the
weekend of Trump and his vice-presidential pick, Senator JD Vance of Ohio: “The
fascists depend on us going back, but we’re not afraid of weird people. We’re a
little bit creeped out, but we’re not afraid.” Just to make sure he got the
point across, Walz added: “The nation found out what we’ve all known in
Minnesota: These guys are just weird.”
As The Times
reported, Harris, speaking at a weekend campaign event at a theater in the
Berkshires, “leaned into a new Democratic attack on the former president and
his running mate, Senator JD Vance of Ohio, saying that some of the swipes the
men had taken against her were ‘just plain weird.’” The Times added: “Pete
Buttigieg, the secretary of transportation, said Mr. Trump was getting ‘older
and stranger’ while Senator Chuck Schumer, the majority leader, called Mr.
Vance ‘weird’ and ‘erratic.’”
It is now a
truism that if Democrats have any hope of carrying key swing states and
overcoming Trump’s advantages in the Electoral College, they have to break
through to white, working-class, non-college-educated men and women, who, if
they have one thing in common, feel denigrated and humiliated by Democratic,
liberal, college-educated elites. They hate the people who hate Trump more than
they care about any Trump policies. Therefore, the dumbest message Democrats
could seize on right now is to further humiliate them as “weird.”
“It is not
only a flight from substance,” noted Prof. Michael J. Sandel of Harvard, author
of “The Tyranny of Merit: Can We Find the Common Good?” “It allows Trump to
tell his supporters that establishment elites look down on them, marginalize
them and view them as ‘outsiders’ — people who are ‘weird.’ It plays right into
Trump’s appeal to his followers that he is taking the slings and arrows of
elites for them. It is a distraction from the big argument that Democrats
should be running on: How we can renew the dignity of work and the dignity of
working men and women.”
I don’t know
what is sufficient for Harris to win, but I sure know what is necessary: a
message that is dignity-affirming for working-class Americans, not
dignity-destroying. If this campaign is descending into name-calling, no one
beats Trump in that arena.
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