and "weird" resonates much better than "mean." Trump and his assortment of Temu despots and their MAGA cult like being called mean because to them it says they're tough and fierce. But nobody wants to be weird. Weird is Shady Vance's alleged upholstery fetish; while there's no evidence he actually has his way with furniture, the meme caught on because he's got a weird, creepy vibe. Weird is a fixation with gold filigrees all over the walls. Weird is painting your face orange. Weird is hinting that you'd like to hump your daughter. Weird is fixating on drag queens and who uses which bathroom. Weird is spending all night posting incoherent rants on social media. Weird is ferocious munchkin Bovino striding around in a Nazi-adjacent greatcoat. Weird is everything about Elon Musk. Weird is WH mouthpiece Baghdad Barbie with her ostentatious cross which inexplicably has so far failed to burst into flames. Mockery is the most effective weapon against authoritarians, and there's no better mockery than accusations of weirdness.
..[J]okes about Trump, ICE, and all the rest of them are a way of reasserting and insisting upon observable reality: what’s taking place is shocking, reprehensible—and also powerfully wack. When then-vice presidential candidate and Minnesota Governor Tim Walz called Trump and his gang “weird,” it went over remarkably well, a rare example of a politician simply saying what so much of the public was thinking.
Humor alone will not save us. But perhaps it allows us to continue the painful task of looking at what’s really happening here, and, in the words of the artist Barbara Kruger, “the ridiculous clusterfuck of totally uncool jokers” who are doing it to us.
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2026/02/greg-bovino-humor-mockery-pathetic/
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