Donald Trump is still weird

[marmar]

Donald Trump is still weird
Democrats have moved away from the useful insult, but that doesn’t make it less true

By Alex Galbraith
Nights and Weekends Editor
Published February 7, 2026 6:30AM (EST)


(Salon) The grievance machine humming under the hood of conservative politics is always racing, but it’s extremely fuel-efficient. Republicans are still running on decades-old tropes about a welfare state that, to a large degree, no longer exists. They’re still fuming about Covid lockdowns, even though the total length of those could be counted in days. And if you get a real GOP dinosaur talking, you might even hear a rant about “Obama phones” or the Affordable Care Act’s supposed “death panels.”

None of this should come as a surprise. Their figurehead, Donald Trump, is a paragon of eternal grudge-holding. He rode his resentment at being iced out of Manhattan parties all the way to the White House, and his beefs have steered American politics through a long red-a*sed decade. In his second term, Trump has put the full power of the state behind repeatedly debunked conspiracies about criminal immigrants and how the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him by Joe Biden and Democrats, with the help of everyone from Venezuela to China. It was this latter grievance that got him in hot water on Friday morning, after he shared a video on Truth Social that resurrected his false claims of widespread voter fraud and international conspiracy and also included a racist clip of former President Barack Obama and his wife Michelle as apes. (After Trump’s press secretary Karoline Leavitt initially defended the post amid bipartisan criticism, it was deleted and the White House blamed an unidentified staffer. On Friday evening, the president refused to apologize.)

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All this makes it even more infuriating that the messaging gurus of Kamala Harris’ 2024 presidential campaign abandoned the “weird” tag so quickly. The insult, which was first launched at Trump and Vice President JD Vance by Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, clearly rattled a party that conceives of itself as the voice of the average American. (The epithet was also largely responsible for elevating Walz to become Harris’ running mate.) In response, the GOP attempted to flip the script in classic rubber-glue playground fashion. Democrats were “the weird ones,” Trump said. “I’m a lot of things, but weird I’m not.”

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But Walz was right. These guys really are weird. The average American doesn’t know who former Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter is, let alone why they should hate him on Trump’s behalf. They’re not privy to the power politics of Manhattan after parties. And Vance’s shift from liberal-Appalachian whisperer to a pseudo-Groyper veep betrays a craven desire for power that most of the country would find off-putting. ...................(more)

https://www.salon.com/2026/02/07/donald-trump-is-still-weird/