This summer, “weird” became the political epithet of the moment. It all started with Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, a few weeks before he was tapped as Kamala Harris’s running mate, calling his eventual GOP counterpart, J.D. Vance, “weird.” Democrats gleefully embraced the insult; for instance, in his keynote at the Democratic National Convention, Barack Obama ridiculed Donald Trump’s obsession with crowd sizes as “weird.” Republicans have tried to turn the insult back on their rivals, with Vance accusing Walz of brandishing a “weird flex,” and pundit Ann Coulter using the same term, in a later-deleted tweet, to describe the veep contender’s teenage son. Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s defunct independent campaign was also described as “historically weird”—and to be fair, admitting on the campaign trail that a worm ate part of your brain is surely a historical first.
Either everyone in politics and p.r. has reverted to a teenage mindset, or something, well, weird is going on.