The New Yorker:

The former President’s appeal has always been his sui-generis persona and politics—take him as he is—but, this year, the campaign seems more devoted to fan service than anything else.

By Clare Malone

“Weird.” It’s an eye-roll-inducing word, overused as it’s been these past two months. The term, which arguably won Governor Tim Walz the No. 2 spot on the Democratic ticket, was a stroke of folksy, linguistic genius: finally, a way to dismissively describe Donald Trump and his cohort without dipping into a self-righteous tone that could turn off wary swing voters. Trump bounded onto the national political stage nearly a decade ago by making race-baiting populism mainstream again. But this year there’s an extra layer of unhinged to his performance—in a recent nationally televised debate, for example, Trump said that Haitian immigrants in Ohio were eating household pets. When challenged by moderators about this online conspiracy theory, Trump defended himself by saying he’d heard about it on TV, which, indeed, was a weird thing to say.

Trump’s Vice-Presidential nominee, the Ohio senator J. D. Vance, added fuel to the racist conspiracy about his own Haitian constituents, by posting on X, “A child was murdered by a Haitian migrant who had no right to be here.” The child in question, an eleven-year-old named Aiden Clark, died after a Haitian immigrant, who was in the country legally on a Temporary Protected Status visa, crashed his car into Clark’s school bus. Clark’s death was no less tragic or senseless but certainly less premeditated than Vance’s remarks might let on (the driver was convicted of vehicular homicide in May). In the days following Trump’s remarks, members of the far-right fascist organization the Proud Boys were seen walking the streets of Springfield; local schools received more than thirty bomb threats, leading Ohio’s governor, Mike DeWine, to direct state troopers to guard the campuses. “Weird” proved to have real-world consequences that fell more into the category of “scary.”

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