“Donald Trump is not weird!”
Alongside “Real Men Wear Diapers” and “Mass Deportation Now,” a new Trump rally sign is coming into vogue with the MAGA cult: “Donald Trump is not weird.” To say they’re giving the game away would be too kind. To say they’re broadcasting their hot buttons and begging us not to push them would be stating the obvious. But it goes without saying, they are protesting way, way too much.
I don’t know about you, brothers and sisters, but from the first I found the epithet “weird” frankly, well, weird. It just didn’t work for me. It was too soft. It felt ineffectual, impotent. It felt like calling Adolf Hitler a “meanie.” I could think of a couple of dozen words I would use first. If you’re going to avoid out and out vulgarity to describe Donald Trump, “creep” works better for me.
But even that isn’t enough. Trump is a rapist, a racist, a traitor, a criminal, a pathological liar. Surely a word stronger than one my centenarian great aunt Kitty would feel right at home using is in order? Ordinarily I would say yes. But “weird” seems to be working. Maybe the people who are using it are on to something. And, as they say, if it ain’t broke …
But WHY is it working? I think the answer has been in front of us all along. Nonconformity has long been a conservative bugbear. However stupid they may look driving their absurd monster trucks festooned with massive Trump flags, wearing t-shirts with jingoistic slogans stretching across bellies that have consumed far too many beers, MAGA ultimately craves white boy conformity. They have dedicated their lives to it.
Never mind how they look, the MAGA freaks picture themselves as the white, blond, Aryan ideal, marching in lockstep across the parade fields of Nuremberg. Back in the days when the fascist Rush Limbaugh dominated the white, conservative radio waves, what did his zombie-like acolytes call themselves? Ditto heads. They would call into his show and the first word they would say would be “ditto.” The MAGA cult adores formations, regimentation, flag-waving uniformity, ritualistic predictability. Calling them “weird” is a direct refutation of those ideals.
On the other hand, call them “fascist” and they laugh at you. In fact they actually find it flattering. Call them uneducated, they assent and glory in their ignorance. Call them anti-democratic and they shrug their shoulders. Besides, “democratic” sounds suspiciously like “Democrat” and to them Democrats are socialists or communists. Call them anything — but don’t call them weird.
Ironically every artist, scientist, every great thinker and visionary in history has been anything but ordinary, anything but a conformist. In fact, they have been weird. The people who made things really happen, who impacted history the most and were most admired were anything but slaves of uniformity.
Such people terrify the MAGA cult. They take a certain perverse comfort in the fact that their Dear Leader changes very little and almost always says the same things. Hitler tried to keep his look — the sweep of unevenly cut forelocks across his brow, his postage stamp moustache — the same over the years. It has become part of the fascist playbook that change is bad and the past was better than we remember it.
So being weird undermines the delicate MAGA security. Calling them weird sends them into a kind of existential panic. So let’s keep it up. Keep saying it. Weird is working. And, as ever, ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, comrades and friends, stay safe.
Robert Harrington is an American expat living in Britain. He is a portrait painter.