Why 'Weird' Works: The Fight Against Hypernormalization Begins

Heidi Siegmund Cuda reports on how a single word — 'weird' — is cratering Donald Trump and the GOP. 'Cry Harder, Creeps!'

Former President Donald Trump at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, on 16 July. Photo: Associated Press / Alamy

Billions of words like stars in the sky have been written to prove Donald Trump worked for the Russian Federation in his first term. 

Dozens of best-selling books have documented Trump’s allegiance to foreign despots, and the best investigative reporters globally exposed how the GOP’s Project 2025 is a recipe to create the Fourth Reich in its total annihilation of US democracy.

Despite all this effort to factually prove that the Republican party is “an autocratic force working from within to destroy democracy, in tandem and in sympathy with foreign autocratic states which have that same goal” — as fascism scholar Ruth Ben-Ghiat has stated — the true believers of the MAGA Cult have proven deaf to reality.

Until now. 

Until one word — one simple word — unleashed the force of a giant meteor now cratering the GOP.

Weird.

Weirdos.

Creepy weirdos.

For the first time since Trump came down the elevator with his midriff-baring red sparrow, er, third wife, the GOP has been caught on its backfoot in an effective campaign to point out what should be really obvious: Trump is weird, and so are those in his orbit.

He’s always been weird — weird hair, weird skin colour, creepy weird decor at Mar-a-Lago, which attracts a really weird crowd.

But as a superb propagandist, he was able to build a cult of personality that looked past what most saw as pretty obvious — that a game show host was trying to be a dictator.

But thanks to the Power of Weird, he’s now looking pretty shabby. Clearly, his propaganda spell was broken at the National Association of Black Journalists event on Wednesday. He was pulled off stage early by his handlers after he punched himself metaphorically in the face with his own racist comments. And news media is getting the headline right: White Man Tells Black Journalists His Black Opponent Is Not Black.