The Other W Word

I am all in on the One Weird Trick Democrats have found--calling Republicans "weird". It works because the GOP ticket is, let's face it, a couple of fucking weirdos, but it goes way beyond them to encompass the party as a whole: their weird conspiracy theories, their weird obsession with children's genitalia, their weird and creepy compulsion to control women.

 
But I'm wondering if there might also be gold in another, more Trump-specific line of attack. Because the thing is, Trump is just really, really whiny.

Trump complains a lot. Like, all the fucking time. He complains morning, noon, and into the wee hours of the night. He complains about being held accountable for his numerous crimes, and he complains about anyone mentioning his convictions. He complains about the polls. He complains about the fact that things change in a campaign, then he turns around and complains about his own campaign's inability to force him to adjust to change. He complains about the microphone, his teleprompters, sound system, and imaginary supporters being denied entry at his rallies. And yesterday he complained about "audio issues" on the X call that, he claims, were responsible for his lisp. There's a case to be made that Trump is the whiniest whiner in the whole whiny history of whinerdom. 

For a long time, especially back in the '80s, the Democrats were widely seen as the party of complainers. This had a lot to do with the racial (and gender, etc.) differential in how white people perceive complaint: white grievance is just people expecting what they're entitled to, while marginalized people stating the facts of life are whiners. Democrats have overcome that perception in various ways--Clinton's triangulation, Obama's Hope--and now the Harris campaign has, in various ways (a candidate who actually laughs, a VP nominee who's Mr. Geniality, the fine-honed mockery of their social media team) recast this race as (in Josh Marshall's phrase) Team Happy vs. Team Mad.

Which I think makes it possible to twist the knife by labeling Trump as the whiner he is.

What "weird" did was crystallize what may have been just a vague sense that a lot of people had. Put a word to it, and you can't not see it. I think we can do that with "whiner". (Imagine a supercut of a bunch of his most stupid, peevish, trivial, or crackpot complaints.) And if it works, the beauty of it is that it's a feedback loop: the worse he does, the whinier he gets, and the whinier he gets, the more unappealing he is. 

I don't know shit about politics. But hey, I think it's worth a try.