Democrats Are Defining Trump As Weird And It's Working

Democrats are defining the Trump/Vance ticket as weird as a way to counter the media's impulse to normalize Donald Trump.

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Democrats Find Their Answer To The Media’s Normalization Of Trump

For nine years, it has been happening. Donald Trump would do abnormal, bizarre, norm-shattering, and, in some cases, illegal things, and the media would respond by normalizing his behavior.

To understand why the media normalizes Trump, it is important to acknowledge that the major media outlets in the United States are run by large corporations whose only motive is to maximize profit. The corporate media, as a structure, doesn’t care about democracy, norms, or whether a political leader is damaging society.

Corporate media coverage is structured to not disrupt access to important people and to try to appeal to the largest possible audience by treating all sides of the political conversation equally.

The media coverage also depends on structures, narratives, and storylines.

A natural impulse of this type of media is to downplay the unusual and to normalize.

Donald Trump was able to manipulate this media normalization mechanism repeatedly. Most recently, there were reports that Trump would be different after the attempted murder of his son. He would be a more normal candidate who would call for unity.

Much of the media pushed the story of the new normal Trump.

The normalization lasted for 17 minutes of Trump’s acceptance speech at the Republican convention.

Democrats and their allies have spent years getting into long-winded discussions about political norms and the rule of law. Democrats used lots of big words, and the media and the bulk of the county tuned them out.

None of it worked.

Months ago, Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN), chair of the Democratic Governors Association, started calling Trump and the Republicans weird. He went viral for his bluntness. The Democratic Governors Association started amplifying Walz’s accurate description of the Republican nominee and his policies.

Here is Walz talking about why he started calling Trump weird:

It was never Joe Biden’s style or brand of politics to call a political opponent weird, but when Kamala Harris became the presumptive Democratic nominee things changed.

On Sunday, Harris campaign national co-chair Mitch Landrieu said on MSNBC after watching a clip of Trump, “I was watching those clips of president Trump. That is an old, tired, grumpy dude who is just cray-cray. He can’t hardly say anything that makes any sense any more. I think they ought to be concerned about his mental acuity and the choices he has made.”

Video of Landrieu:

The Democrats have found a way to counter the media normalization of Trump, and we’ll talk about why it is working below.