CRAIG BROWN: Look out! The US election’s just got even more weird
Kamala Harris reportedly picked Tim Walz as her running mate for vice president because she was impressed by his description of her rival, Donald Trump, as “weird.”
For some reason, the insult had become so popular that it clearly irritated the person it was actually intended to irritate: Trump himself.
During an interview with radio host Clay Travis, Trump was still smoldering. “Nobody ever called me weird.” Oddly enough, he repeated the same line: “Nobody ever called me weird.” Then he added, “I am many things, but weird is not me.”
Walz, the governor of the Midwestern state of Minnesota, also described Republican vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance as “odd,” which also angered Trump. “I’ll tell you what. J.D. is not odd at all. They are. We’re not odd people. We’re actually the opposite.”
It’s strange—weird, even—that everyone seems to have forgotten when the word “weird” was first publicly applied to Trump.
They say Kamala Harris chose Tim Walz as her running mate after being impressed by his description of Trump as ‘weird’
Trump told radio host Clay Travis that ‘nobody ever called me weird’
It was seven years ago, on January 20, 2017, and it happened outside the Capitol in Washington, DC. President Trump had taken the oath of office and many thought he would deliver an inaugural address that was dignified and statesmanlike.
Instead, he began to rail, portraying America as broken, with “rusted factories strewn like tombstones across our nation’s landscape.” He blamed previous presidents, before announcing, “The American carnage stops here, now… From this moment on, it’s America First.”
As Trump’s tirade ended, former President George W. Bush turned to defeated presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and uttered the immortal words, “Now, that was some really weird shit.”
The word ‘weird’ is, fittingly enough, itself weird. Just look at the way it’s spelled: if it were a conventional word, we’d spell it ‘weird’. But no: it’s one of those strange words, like ‘beige’ or ‘heist’, that refuses to obey the rule every schoolchild knows: ‘i before e except after c’.
The word “weird” has gone in and out of fashion. By the 1400s, it was spelled “wierd,” developed from the Old English “wyrd,” and meant “having the power to determine people’s fates,” which certainly qualifies Donald Trump as a wierd or wyrd, if not weird.
It then fell into disfavor until 1606, when several characters in Macbeth referred to the three witches as the “Weird Sisters.” Unfortunately, Shakespeare forgot to write a speech in which a witch retaliated, saying, “No one ever called me weird. I am many things, but weird I am not.”
Ever since its revival in Macbeth, people have been using the adjective “weird” to mean strange. Is it just a coincidence that Trump was born in 1946, which, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, was just three years before the adjective became the noun “weirdie”? By 1955, “weirdie” had become “weirdo,” which is still popular today.
Until recently, weirdos were easily identified as people who talked to themselves in public. If you saw someone coming towards you talking nonsense, you turned around and looked away.
Walz also called Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, “weird”
Donald Trump’s speeches have increasingly become unstructured wanderings inside his skull
But since the advent of the mobile phone, the weirdos have taken over. Nowadays, everyone on the street talks at full volume, even if no one is walking next to them.
Donald Trump’s speeches have increasingly become unstructured ramblings inside his skull, addressed to everyone and no one. “I have to be the cleanest—I think I may be the most honest human being that God ever created,” he said at a rally in North Carolina in 2022.
Last year, at a meeting in Iowa, he started talking about sharks for no apparent reason: “If I’m sitting there and that boat is sinking and I’m standing on top of a battery and the water starts coming in, I’ll start to worry.
“But then I look ten yards to my left and there’s a shark, so I have a choice between electrocution and a shark. You know what I’m going to take? Electrocution. I’ll take electrocution every time. Are we in agreement? Yes, I’ll take electrocution.”
Perhaps that’s why Tim Walz’s comment hits the mark: if someone near you spoke like that, you’d undoubtedly think, “weird,” but then quickly move on.