Weird is not necessarily a bad thing. BBQ chicken pizza is weird. Portland is weird. Aubrey Plaza is weird. The opening ceremonies to the Paris Olympics were weird in the best, most French way imaginable.
But JD Vance is just … weird. And not in a good way.
Weird enough that Sen. Chuck Schumer thinks that Vance is one of the best things Donald Trump has ever done. For Democrats, that is.
Weird enough that Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz says that people are “a little bit creeped out” by Vance, even if they are ”not afraid.”
Weird enough that after Trump whined about all the money he had spent fighting President Joe Biden before Biden passed the torch to Vice President Kamala Harris, Trump may now have to whine about how much it will cost to replace all that Trump/Vance merchandise when he gets rid of his extremely poor choice.
As Schumer said Sunday, on “Face the Nation,” Vance is an “incredibly bad choice.”
“I’ll bet President Trump is sitting there, scratching his head, and wondering, ‘Why did I pick this guy?’” said the Senate majority leader. “The choice may be one of the best things he ever did for Democrats.”
But the word that keeps coming up, over and over, in descriptions of Vance is just “weird.” Because he is weird. In the plastic-y, inauthentic way that only someone who made a massive flip-flop on Trump to forward his own political ambitions can achieve.
As Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear points out, Vance may be the only actual human being who claims to have an “origin story.”
“Batman has an origin story,” Beshear said. “Fictional characters have an origin story. Real people have childhoods. That’s how contrived his story is.”
The Harris campaign sent an email that’s even more blunt, linking to a story about Vance’s bizarre search for dolphin porn. But more importantly, that email also focuses on Vance outlining a conspiracy theory that includes abortion, racism, and antisemitism.
Vance: Okay look, here’s the situation, let’s say Roe v. Wade is overruled, Ohio bans abortion in 2022, let's say 2024, and then, you know, every day George Soros sends a 747 to Columbus to load up disproportionately Black women to get them to go have abortions in California. And of course, the left will celebrate this as a victory for diversity. … If that happens do you need some federal response to prevent it from happening because it’s really creepy? And you know, I’m pretty sympathetic to that actually.
As the campaign’s email points out, there’s definitely something creepy here. And it’s Vance.
Weirdness has become a theme in the campaign. As Democratic strategist Tim Hogan points out, “weird” is not meant as not a knock on people who are quirky or different.
“It perfectly describes the uneasiness people feel,” Hogan said. “It’s how people who don’t live and breathe politics every day react to hearing the Republican vice presidential candidate denigrate people without children.”
Vance’s long-standing obsession with “cat ladies” is weird. But the extremist right-wing natalism is just one of Vance’s many weird views that include opposing abortion even in cases of rape and incest, raising taxes on people who don’t have children, giving more votes to people with children, and making no-fault divorce illegal.
And then there are the rumors about Vance’s attraction to couches.
As Vox points out, “J.D. Vance didn’t have sex with a couch. But he’s still extremely weird.” The idea that Vance is bisectional is not true, said Vox, beginning with an online post that went viral and spawned a thousand memes. However, “the couch joke was only one of the three most off-putting things Vance has been known for during his first 10 days as a VP nominee, and the only one that wasn’t verified as true.”
Vance’s public appearances haven’t exactly put his weirdness to rest. For example, there was the moment when he claimed that Democrats would call him racist because he drank Diet Mountain Dew—a joke so awkward that Vance’s hometown Republican audience was left just staring at the guy who wants to be a heartbeat from the presidency.
Since his addition to the ticket, Vance has been a welcome drag on Trump’s campaign. During a week when Trump himself was desperately trying to get back into the media spotlight he lost with the entry of the dynamic Harris, his vice presidential pick was constantly being mentioned on social media and in the news … for being such an incredible dud.
Still, maybe Trump doesn’t have to start redesigning all those signs, mugs, and T-shirts. Maybe he can just find someone else named “Vance” and make a quick swap. The most famous person with the last name Vance is apparently prolific fantasy and science fiction author Jack Vance, who wrote a series of novels about a far future earth where science and magic co-exist. That’s a lot less weird than the cat ladies guy. Also, Jack Vance died in 2013, so at least he won’t be making any painful jokes about soft drinks.
Vance is weird. Bad weird. And it runs in the political family.
Help make weird a good thing again by giving $10 to the Kamala Harris campaign to keep Thing 1 and Thing 2 out of the White House!
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