‘Weird’ JD Vance is becoming a big problem for Trump

Republicans are finding it hard to repel aggressively mocking comments about their choice for vice-president

How weird is JD Vance, Donald’s Trump’s pick as vice-presidential running mate? Well, the Democrats would have you believe the answer is “very”. The true impact of Kamala Harris’s honeymoon is hard to assess, but there’s no doubt her campaign is enjoying an injection of vigour, money and recruits. 
Seizing the moment, the Democrats have started to do something that Joe Biden’s decrepitude made impossible: attack. And their main tactic right now is to blitz the Democratic-adjacent media (from podcasts to TV networks such as MSNBC and CNN) with references to Vance being odd. Every liberal pundit, senator, governor and wannabe partner for Harris is saying the same thing over and over again –  that the Ohio senator is “weird”. It appears to be working.
Here’s a small sample of what’s being said: “He’s just weird”; “He’s weird and creepy”; “Just plain weird”; “He’s such a weirdo”; “Deeply and profoundly weird”; “Weird is probably generous”. You get the idea. Their argument rests mainly on what Vance has said about women over the years, building to his infamous disdain for Democratic “childless cat ladies”, such as Harris herself, with no stake in the future of America. 
And some of his pronouncements do undoubtedly have a queasy quality to them. In 2019 Vance said during a speech: “We think babies are good and we think babies are good because we’re not sociopaths.”
In 2021 he made another speech in which he said: “Let’s give votes to all the children in this country and let’s give control over votes to the parents… When you go to the polls, you should have more power than people who don’t have kids.”
The “weird” narrative wouldn’t be so effective had it not plugged into that uncanny knack the public have of judging politicians with their guts rather than their minds. So the fact that Vance appears to wear eyeliner is one of those trivial but important whispers that adds to the sense there is something strangely unknowable about him. There’s nothing wrong with wearing eyeliner, but because it’s Vance it implies he’s not on the level.
There was also an internet rumour that he once had sex with his sofa (a story that a Twitter prankster has since admitted he made up), adding to Vance’s reputation as an atypical politician, though not in a good way. (I knew a boy at school who engineered a comparable assignation with a mattress and he never, ever lived it down, so don’t expect this to go away.)
What has the Republicans rattled is not just the polling – nationally Harris has narrowed a gap of six percentage points to just one and is leading in four of six battleground states – but that since Sleepy Joe said goodnight the Democrats have replaced witless self-defence with aggressive mockery, which is surprisingly hard to repel, although it remains to be seen how long it works once Trump himself goes into full attack mode in the autumn.
In response, Republicans have resorted to labelling the Democrats’ cheerleaders “NPCs” or non-player characters. In video games, NPCs flesh out the story and are not controlled by a player. Calling your cultural enemies NPCs – blind followers lacking independent thought – has become common on both sides. This dehumanisation is going to push the political culture to even uglier depths, saying that opponents are not real, but Matrix-style programmable, fleshy manifestations of algorithms.
That tech titans such as Elon Musk (who called one of his children “X Æ A-12”) endorse such terms should be a cause for concern. In video games, NPCs tend to end up getting run over or shot to pieces with no consequences. That way of thinking about actual human beings doesn’t feel like a great way to build back unity in the free world. One bad turn deserves another, it seems.