The National Republican Senatorial Committee has some dazzling guidance for attacking Vice President Kamala Harris now that she is considered the front-runner to face convicted felon Donald Trump this November. According to a memo obtained by Axios, the vice president should be described as a “radical” progressive and an architect of the border crisis. And she’s “weird.”
The memo also includes a "weird" category—mocking Harris's "habit of laughing at inappropriate moments," her self-proclaimed love of Venn diagrams and her call to ban plastic straws, among other things.
Trump’s policy record is garbage, his immigration record is one of human rights violations, and his tendency to be “weird” is off the charts. Here are 19 times Trump was … weird.
1. Praising “the late, great, Hannibal Lecter.”
Trump has repeatedly conjured up fictional serial murderer and cannibal Hannibal Lecter during rally speeches—he even did so in his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention. Famously played by Anthony Hopkins in the film “The Silence of the Lambs,” it is hard to parse exactly what Trump is getting at when he praises the psychopathic character.
2. His strange preoccupation with the “genius” of realizing that the word “us” appears in the acronym “U.S.A.”
“You know, you spell us right? You spell us U-S. I just picked that up. Has anyone ever thought of that? A couple of days [ago] I’m reading and it said us. And I said, you know, if you think about it, us equals U-S.”
3. Remember that photo, alongside the Saudi King, with his tiny hands on the glowing orb?
Trump’s first foreign tour as president began in the Middle East where he met with Saudi Arabia’s King Salman bin Abdul-Aziz Al Saud, and the two men did this:
4. When Trump sorta curtsy-bowed before the Saudi King?
After he had attacked President Barack Obama for leaning over to receive a similar Saudi welcome, Trump did this?
Trump was delivering remarks to the press on vaping, when he referred to Barron Trump—who is his third son—as “Melania’s son.” What is that about?
6. Humping the American Flag on various stages across the country.
Why does he do that so much?
7. Saluting a North Korean general.
We all know that Trump loves him some dictators, but it was strange when he decided to give a military salute to an adversarial country’s general. The strangeness took place during a summit between North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and Trump when the salutation occurred.
8. Electric boat versus battery versus shark?
Do you remember where you were when Trump offered up a thought experiment about whether you would prefer to be electrocuted in water or eaten by a shark? And that tangent was in response to Trump explaining the problems with electric vehicles?
So I said, so there’s a shark 10 yards away from the boat, 10 yards or here, do I get electrocuted if the boat is sinking? Water goes over the battery, the boat is sinking. Do I stay on top of the boat and get electrocuted, or do I jump over by the shark and not get electrocuted? Because I will tell you, he didn’t know the answer. He said, ‘You know, nobody’s ever asked me that question.” I said, ‘I think it’s a good question.’ I think there’s a lot of electric current coming through that water. But you know what I’d do if there was a shark or you get electrocuted, I’ll take electrocution every single time. I’m not getting near the shark. So we’re going to end that.
9. Trump’s toilet claim: Americans need to flush “10 times, 15 times, as opposed to once.”
That was Trump rambling about toilets, sinks, and showers. “You turn on the faucet and you don’t get any water. They take a shower and water comes dripping out. Just dripping out, very quietly dripping out,” was just one of the many odd facts Trump gave out during his attacks on water-saving regulations. The ranting went on well past the White House, as Trump took his mystifying takes on the road to rallies—all the way through his second impeachment.
10. Doctoring a weather map with a black Sharpie.
Trump’s bizarre attempt to frighten Alabama residents by crudely doctoring a map, forecasting the path of a hurricane, will always go down as both ridiculous and insidious.
11. Making Clorox great again.
It was April 2020, and while COVID-19 was ravaging countries around the world, Trump took to the world stage to suggest to the press, and his own officials, that disinfectant might be injected into the human body to kill the virus.
So supposing we hit the body with a tremendous, whether it’s ultraviolet or just very powerful light. And I think you said that hasn’t been checked but you’re going to test it. And then I said supposing you brought the light inside the body, which you can do either through the skin or in some other way. And I think you said you’re going to test that, too. Sounds interesting. Right? And then I see the disinfectant, it knocks it out in a minute. One minute. And is there a way we can do something like that, by injection inside or almost a cleaning? Because you see it gets in the lungs and it does a tremendous number on the lungs, so it would be interesting to check that. So you’re going to have to use medical doctors, right? But it sounds interesting to me. So we’ll see, but the whole concept of the light, the way it kills it in one minute. That’s pretty powerful.
12. How do magnets work?
It is hard to compete with this Trump statement from January: “All I know about magnets is this, give me a glass of water, let me drop it on the magnets, that's the end of the magnets.”
13. Does Trump not know who Frederick Douglass was, or did he just find out?
“I am very proud now that we have a museum on the National Mall where people can learn about Reverend King, so many other things,” Trump said. “Frederick Douglass is an example of somebody who’s done an amazing job and is being recognized more and more, I notice.”
14. The time when the Continental Army took over the airports.
Trump blamed his teleprompter, but his retelling of the American Revolution, including the heroic takeover of airports over 100 years before the airplane was invented, was very peculiar.
“Our army manned the air, it rammed the ramparts, it took over the airports, it did everything it had to do, and at Fort McHenry, under the rockets’ red glare, it had nothing but victory.”
15. Trump hates windmills and thinks televisions turn off if there isn’t enough wind.
Trump has frequently railed against windmills but he’s also shown a curious understanding of how renewable energy functions in the real world. Here he is in 2019, explaining a theoretical conversation a couple has after installing windmills.
“Let's put up some windmills. When the wind doesn't blow, just turn off the television darling, please. There's no wind, please turn off the television quickly.”
16. When Trump shoved a world leader out of the way in order to be in front for a photo.
Who does that????
17. When Trump asked a 7-year-old if he still believed in Santa.
Real War on Christmas vibes here.
18. Trump seems to believe we have invisible planes.
Trump’s comments in 2017, coupled with comments he’s made since, sure implies he is under the impression that we have Wonder Woman technology.
"With the Air Force, we're ordering a lot of planes, in particular the F-35 fighter jet, which is, you know, almost like an invisible fighter," he said. "I was asking the Air Force guys, I said, 'How good is this plane?' They said, 'Well, sir, you can't see it.' I said, yeah, but in a fight —you know, a fight, like I watch in the movies —they fight, they're fighting. How good is this? They say, 'Well, it wins every time because the enemy cannot see it. Even if it's right next to it, it can't see it.' I said, 'That helps. That's a good thing.'"
19. Robert E. Lee was a pirate shanty singer?
Finally, who could forget Trump’s attempt to give his own wow-filled Gettysburg Address in April. That’s when he recounted American history like … this:
There’s an infinite amount of examples detailing the strangeness of Trump. The GOP going after Harris for laughing sounds like a desperate recipe for failure. Here’s a bonus memory for the QAnon traveler who happens upon this article, because Trump hangs with only the best people:
Pitch in what you can to help Kamala Harris win the White House this November.
