Kamala Harris is said to have chosen Tim Walz as her vice presidential running mate after being impressed by his description of her rival, Donald Trump, as “weird.”
For some reason, the insult had been successful and had clearly irritated the only person it was intended to irritate: Trump himself.
In an interview with radio host Clay Travis, Trump was still fuming: “No one has ever called me weird.” Curiously, he repeated the same phrase: “No one has ever called me weird.” He added: “I am many things, but I am not weird.”
Walz, governor of the Midwestern state of Minnesota, also described Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance as “weird,” and this also rankled Trump. “I’ll tell you what: JD is not weird at all. They are. We’re not weird people. We’re actually the opposite.”
It’s strange – odd, even – that everyone seems to have forgotten the first time the word “strange” was publicly used to refer to Trump.
Kamala Harris reportedly chose Tim Walz as her running mate after being impressed with his description of Trump as “weird”
Trump told radio host Clay Travis that “no one has ever called me weird”
It was seven years ago, on January 20, 2017, and it happened in front of the Capitol in Washington DC. President Trump had been sworn in and many imagined he would deliver a dignified, statesmanlike inaugural address.
Instead, he launched into a tirade, portraying America as a broken country, with “rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation.” He blamed previous presidents for this, before announcing: “The American carnage stops right here, right now… From this moment on, America first.”
As Trump finished his speech, former President George W. Bush turned to the defeated candidate, Hillary Clinton, and said these immortal words: “Well, that was some weird shit.”
Of course, the word “weird” is itself weird. Just look at the way it is spelled: if it were a conventional word, we would spell it “wierd.” But no: it is one of those weird words, like “beige” or “heist,” that refuse to obey the rule that every schoolchild knows: “i before e, except after c.”
The word “weird” has come in and out of fashion. Around 1400, it was spelled “wierd,” derived from the Old English “wyrd,” and meant “having the power to control the fate of men,” which certainly qualifies Donald Trump as “weird” or “wyrd,” if not “weird.”
It then fell out of favor until 1606, when several characters in Macbeth referred to the three witches as the “odd sisters.” Unfortunately, Shakespeare forgot to write a speech in which a witch responded by saying, “No one ever called me odd. I am many things, but odd I am not.”
Ever since it resurfaced in Macbeth, people have used the adjective “weird” to refer to someone odd. Is it pure 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 evolved into “weirdo,” which remains popular today.
Until recently, it was easy to spot weirdos as people who talked to themselves in public. If you saw someone approaching you talking nonsense at the top of their lungs, you would turn away and look away.
Walz also referred to Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, as “weird.”
Donald Trump’s speeches have increasingly become unstructured ramblings about the inside of his skull.
But ever since the mobile phone came along, the weirdos have taken over. Nowadays, almost everyone on the street is talking loudly, even if there’s no one 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’m the most honest human being, perhaps, that God has ever created,” he said at a rally in North Carolina in 2022.
Last year, for no apparent reason, he talked nonstop about sharks at a rally in Iowa: ‘If I’m sitting there and that boat is sinking and I’m on top of a battery and the water starts coming in, I’m worried.
“But then I look ten meters to my left and there’s a shark there, so I have to choose between being electrocuted or a shark. You know what I’m going to accept? Being electrocuted. I’ll accept electrocution every time. Are we okay? Yes, I’ll accept electrocution.”
Perhaps that’s why Tim Walz’s observation hit home: because if someone in your neighborhood started talking like that, you’d probably think “weirdo” before quickly walking on.