Former President Donald Trump doesn’t like being called “weird,” but emails coming out of the Trump-Vance campaign in recent days could at least be described as peculiar.
Among their other dubious claims, emails have gone out since Sunday claiming that even in the whirlwind of a national campaign, the two had time to discuss obscure individual voters by name and profess their personal love for them — before asking for money.
After a June 27 debate with a spectral President Joe Biden, the Trump campaign was riding high. But it’s struggled to find its footing since Trump picked Ohio U.S. Sen. J.D. Vance as his running mate on July 15.
Biden withdrew from the race a week later. Vice President Kamala Harris quickly consolidated support to be his replacement and revived flagging Democratic hopes as she did.
Republicans already had a problem with women — especially since GOP appointees to the U.S. Supreme Court in 2022 ended national abortion protections under Roe v Wade.
It didn’t help when, a week after Vance was picked, a 2021 interview resurfaced in which he attacked Harris for not having biological children. He claimed the country was run by Democrats and that they were “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.”
Then last week, Trump appeared at a convention of Black journalists and called ABC’s Rachel Scott, who is Black, “nasty” and “hostile” for confronting him with some of his earlier racist statements. An angry Trump then falsely stated that VP Harris misled voters about her race. He claimed she had only embraced her Black ancestry recently and implied that she had only done so to seek political advantage.
Harris’ mother is Indian and her father is Jamaican. She attended a historically Black college and joined a historically Black sorority, so Trump at least should have known that the claims he was making to Black journalists were untrue and that many in the audience would find them offensive. His performance dominated the news cycle.
In the midst of these and news of more controversial statements by Vance, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, a Democrat, started calling Trump and Vance “weird.” It caught on.
Trump fired back, saying he’d never been called weird — in response to being called weird.
“They’re the weird ones,” he said. “ Nobody’s ever called me weird. I’m a lot of things, but weird I’m not. And I’m upfront. And he’s not either, I will tell you. JD is not at all. They are.”
Harris named Walz as her vice presidential pick on Tuesday, so the debate over who’s weird and who’s not is likely to continue.
Meanwhile, the Trump-Vance campaign started over the weekend to send out a spate of emails that seemed kind of weird.
“President Trump & I love you, *****,” said the subject line of an email from Vance that greeting an unsuspecting reader at 8:12 a.m. Sunday. It named a person Vance had never met, but had passed on a Cincinnati sidewalk — once.
“It would be President Trump’s and my great honor to be endorsed by YOU, *****,” the body of the email said, before promising to do such things as “DEMOLISH the Deep State,” and “EXPOSE the Dangerous Liberal Agenda.”
It included three buttons that led to a donation page where you can contribute amounts including $20.24, or $47 “IF YOU THINK TRUMP IS THE GREATEST PRESIDENT OF ALL TIME!”
And it quotes Trump saying, “I am Donald J. Trump. FEAR NOT! I will always love you for supporting me. Unity. Peace. Make America Great Again.”
The recipient of that email might already have been flattered by the personal attention lavished by two such important figures, but that wasn’t the end.
At 6:42 p.m. Sunday, Vance sent another email, the subject of which said, “I just got off the phone with President Trump — He had a lot of great things to say about you.”
“*****, you came HIGHLY RECOMMENDED by President Trump himself,” Vance said in the email, addressing the same person he’d never met. “So now that I’m recruiting the strongest MAGA Republicans to join my Official Vice Presidential Advisory Board, I want to extend the VERY FIRST invitation to YOU!”
If those weren’t flattering enough, an email came in at 8:13 a.m. Monday from the big guy himself.
“The MAGA revolution will not be televised — *****, I can’t take down the deep state without you,” the subject line said, again naming the person he and his running mate love, but haven’t met.
“ARE YOU STILL VOTING FOR ME after the DEEP STATE kicked Joe out of the election, and replaced him with Dangerously Liberal Kamala?” it asked in italics before adding. “I’m SICK of listening to vicious lies from the FAKE NEWS MEDIA.”
Which was weird, because the recipient — whom Vance and Trump supposedly love — is a member of that news media.
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