It seems to me that it took us far too long to come around to a pretty simple conclusion. Sure, Trump is hateful, and he’s not really all that smart, and his campaign goals are straight-up awful.

But what if we slow down for a minute and reflect on how bizarre the things he says are?

I don’t even mean just during this campaign. I mean, Trump has been weird since the beginning. He says things that simply would not occur to other people to even think about, let alone vocalize.

“Covfefe,” anyone?

I bet you forgot about that one entirely, even if him suggesting you could inject disinfectant to cure COVID is still fresh in your brain.

What about the time Trump waxed rhapsodic about the chocolate cake he served to the President of China while mentioning incidentally that he’d just launched an airstrike against Syria during their dinner?

“We had the most beautiful piece of chocolate cake that you’ve ever seen and President Xi was enjoying it,” Trump told reporters. “So what happens is I said, ‘We’ve just launched 59 missiles heading to Iraq and I wanted you to know this.'” Yeah, no. He bombed SYRIA, not Iraq. That cake must have been pretty delicious.

Again, weird.

Remember that time he threw rolls of toilet paper at a crowd of hurricane victims in Puerto Rico?

More recently, Trump’s strange statements have gotten concentrated into single speeches. In Minnesota yesterday, he made his seventh public reference to the “late, great Hannibal Lecter,” suggested a UFC league to pit professional fighters against migrants, claimed to have taught a pro golfer some “new tricks,” and said that he will behave “worse” than he did during his first term.

In fact, “weird” has pretty much become the de facto term for his behavior lately. MSNBC even did a little video roundup of people publicly calling the former president AND his running mate weird (because let’s not leave JD “childless cat ladies” Vance out of this).

You can see Trump’s political opponents in a rapid-fire and hilarious series of jabs at Trump’s weirdness in this clip via internet legend @acyn:

MSNBC put together a collection of clips of Democrats calling Trump and Vance weird pic.twitter.com/kLgwpXOCr4

— Acyn (@Acyn) July 28, 2024

What’s most ironic about the whole thing is that the weirdest thing of all so far in this campaign turned out to be untrue. JD Vance never wrote anything in his Hillbilly Elegy memoir about having sex with a couch.

But for a minute, we all believed it, because these guys are just plain weird.