... The Harris campaign, working to redefine the race with particular attention to the youth vote, including colorizing online HarrisHQ banners lime green after Charli xcx’s “brat” endorsement, has sought to draw attention to Trump’s rally storytelling. Particularly, they have highlighted his frequent but references to fictional serial killer Hannibal Lecter of Silence of the Lambs fame as well as the choice between being shocked by a sinking electric boat or being eaten by a shark.
But “weird” is what seems to be sticking, in part as an apparent simplification of warnings about the threat to democracy that Trump poses – which dominated 15 months of Biden’s re-election campaign.
Minnesota’s Democratic governor Tim Walz appears to have started the “weird” political trendline. He posted on X, “Say it with me: Weird,” in response to a video of Trump speaking about Lecter. Walz later followed up with “these guys are weird” to describe Trump and Vance.
During a Sunday appearance on CNN’s State of the Union, Walz was asked if “weird” had replaced existential threat to democracy as a more effective attack strategy. The retired high school educator and football coach replied: “It’s an observation because being a schoolteacher I see a lot of things.”
Walz added that a second Trump presidency could indeed put women’s lives at risk over reproductive rights after three of his US supreme court appointees helped eliminate federal abortion rights in 2022. He also said Trump could end other constitutional liberties – but musing about his embodiment of a threat to democracy “gives him way too much power,” Walz argued.
“Listen to the guy. He’s talking about Hannibal Lecter and shocking sharks and whatever crazy thing pops into his mind,” Walz said.
“I think we give him way too much credit. If you just ratchet down some of the scariness and just name it what it is. Have you seen the guy laugh? It seems very weird to me that an adult can go through six-and-a-half years of being in the public eye and when he laughs it’s at someone – not with them.”
“That’s very weird behavior,” Walz explained on State of the Union. “I don’t think you call it anything else. It’s simply what we’re observing.”...
Weird. Sick. Deranged. Fascistic. It all works for us. And Gov. Walz? He's got chops, so don't sleep on him as our VP candidate. We're grateful Democrats have such a deep and deeply normal bench.
During her rise through America’s most prestigious schools, law firms and judicial clerkships, Usha Vance rarely — if ever — volunteered her opinions on the nation’s bitterly partisan politics to friends and colleagues.
But she did express revulsion at former president Donald Trump’s actions on Jan. 6, 2021.
Vance told friends she was outraged by Trump’s incitement of the deadly riot at the U.S. Capitol and lamented the social breakdown that fueled his political support, according to one friend, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive conversations. Her view at the time contrasts with the later pronouncements of her husband and Trump’s newly minted running mate, JD Vance, who has downplayed the storming of the Capitol and called participants who were jailed “political prisoners.”
“Usha found the incursion on the Capitol and Trump’s role in it to be deeply disturbing,” the friend recalled. “She was generally appalled by Trump, from the moment of his first election.”
Speaking the morning after Usha Vance introduced her husband at the Republican National Convention and watched his speech from the same VIP box as Trump, the friend added, “It was surreal to see her sitting next to him last night.”
That sensation is widely shared among her friends, former co-workers and fellow alumni, more than two dozen of whom spoke to The Washington Post for this story. Some watched in disbelief on July 17 when Usha Vance, 38, addressed an overwhelmingly White crowd on the convention floor that tittered uneasily as she joked about her husband learning to cook Indian food and audibly gasped when she mentioned her vegetarian diet. [snip]
Jai Chabria, a Republican strategist for JD Vance’s 2022 Senate campaign and a family friend, said Usha’s views of the former president have changed, mirroring the evolution of her husband, once a fierce Trump critic.
“Usha has had a similar shift in views and fully supports Donald Trump and her husband and will do whatever she can to ensure their victory this November,” Chabria said in a statement provided by the Vance spokesperson. A Trump campaign spokeswoman did not comment for this story...
"A similar shift in views" caused by extreme ambition, misplaced loyalty, and a serious lack of convictions. Yet another example in MAGA world of the bad things people will do for access to power.
For a time, Donald Trump would have made for an unlikely headliner at a cryptocurrency confab.
As president, Trump declared bitcoin “not money” and criticized it as “highly volatile and based on thin air.” He cautioned that crypto assets helped facilitate illegal underground markets.
“We have only one real currency in the USA, and it is stronger than ever,” Trump wrote on Twitter in 2019. “It is called the United States Dollar!”
But on Saturday, Trump addressed the cryptocurrency industry’s largest annual gathering here in Nashville not as a cynic but as one of its best-known supporters – the culmination of a total reversal on the issue during the former president’s latest White House bid.
Despite cryptocurrency’s troubling recent history and his own past reservations, Trump has fully embraced the hype and hopes of the nascent industry. His campaign now accepts bitcoin donations – and has collected about $4 million worth, a source with knowledge of his fundraising said. He has attacked the Biden administration’s efforts to regulate the industry as a “war on crypto” without acknowledging the massive fraud schemes that have shattered public confidence in digital currencies. And he has vowed as president to make it easier for cryptocurrency mining companies to operate in the United States...
Con artist recognizes a con, amirite? His appearance at the convention of the credulous was also marked by more *weird* stuff coming out of his cryptohole:
"... [W]e will be creating so much electricity that you'll be saying, Please, please, President, we don't want any more electricity. We can't stand it. You'll be begging me, no more electricity, sir, we have enough. We have enough."
Yikes!
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