Is Kamala “Weird?”

Written by Ecce Verum

As I mentioned in a recent article, Kamala’s appeal comes from portraying herself as a more normal, mainstream, and civil choice than Trump. As she remarked to one audience,

“a lot of what I think is happening . . . is that people are exhausted about the division and the attempts to kind of divide us as Americans.”

And, when running against someone as idiosyncratic as Trump, it’s an obvious—and pretty smart—marketing choice. This marketing strategy even influences particular words the Harris campaign uses.

For example, Kamala has taken to labeling Trump and Vance with a particular word that we all learned in elementary school, but which has taken on a whole new nature when leveled against Trump: “weird.”

As the AP reports, the Harris camp has been labeling both Trump and Vance as “weird” this election season. Responding to a Trump appearance on Fox News in July, the Harris campaign noted questioningly that “Trump is old and quite weird?”

The AP further reports on news releases that declare “JD Vance is weird” and a Harris spokesperson who described Vance as “making headlines for his out-of-touch, weird ideas.” Both AP and BBC have entire articles discussing the Harris marketing strategy of “weird.”

And I’ll have to admit—the “weird” label does seem a bit more effective than Biden’s hyperbolic method of labeling Trump as a “threat to democracy.” Why spend a ton of effort denouncing Trump as the end of the world when you could just make him seem irrelevant and petty?

But there’s a difference between a marketing scheme being catchy and a marketing scheme being true.

Is Kamala in fact the “reasonable, normal” alternative to “weird” Trump? U.S. Representative Greg Steube doesn’t think so. As a matter of fact, he recently introduced a bill to hamper what he would see as Kamala’s weirdness.

His recent press release brings our attention to a candidate questionnaire that the Harris campaign filled out in 2019 (remember that Harris ran for president back then, too). When Harris was asked by the ACLU whether she would ensure that transgender inmates or immigration detainees would have access to “gender transition” treatment, she responded:

“I support policies ensuring that federal prisoners and detainees are able to obtain medically necessary care for gender transition, including surgical care, while incarcerated or detained. Transition treatment is a medical necessity, and I will direct all federal agencies responsible for providing essential medical care to deliver transition treatment.”

In other words, back in 2019 Kamala committed to not only supporting “gender transition” treatment—which is shocking and perverted in itself—but to do so with taxpayer money, for criminals, and for illegal immigrants.

Perversion is all the more shocking when you bend over backwards to deliver it to lawbreakers and make ordinary Americans pay for it. This leads Steube to conclude that Harris is “definitely not in the mainstream.”

Now, a Harris campaign spokesman did clarify in September that the 2019 questionnaire is “not what she’s proposing, it’s not what she’s running on.” But that just prompts a further question: What changed? Is it now just the wrong political moment to propose this?

Or did you actually change your mind on any of the core values that led you to say this back in 2019? Politicians are notorious for soft-pedaling things they’ve said in the past when the political moment isn’t right anymore.

And so even if she doesn’t emphasize this point anymore, I’d need some pretty serious convincing that she’s not still that radical.

Accordingly, Steube has introduced a bill to prevent this from ever happening, should Harris decide to revive this commitment. His bill is also a marvel of marketing genius: the “Stopping Transgender Operation Payments and Wacky Expenses for Illegal Residents and Detainees Act of 2024,” which literally spells “S.T.O.P. W.E.I.R.D.”

Just a couple sections long, the bill prohibits Federal funds from being used for “gender transition” procedures for people in the custody of the Departments of Homeland Security or Health and Human Services.

This should be common sense no matter what party you belong to. And the bill throws the “weird” label right back at the Harris camp.

As Steube put it in an interview about his bill,

“Kamala likes to call JD Vance and other Republicans ‘weird.’ But I think the majority of the American people believe that using taxpayer dollars for gender transition surgeries for illegal immigrants would be ‘weird.'”

Ultimately, to see whether a politician is “normal” or “weird,” you really need to look at the kind of policies the politician supports and has supported in the past.

When you look at it that way, Kamala doesn’t quite seem to be the same “normal” alternative to political weirdness.