Coalition of the ‘weird’ mobilises for Donald Trump

The British movie star and the Canadian intellectual stood before the crowd, urging them to vote for Donald Trump to keep America weird.

Trump backers out in force at the Rescue the Republic rally in Washington. Picture: The Wall Street Journal

The British movie star and the Canadian intellectual stood before the soggy crowd on the Mall, urging them to vote for Donald Trump to keep America weird.

“The vanilla-zation of culture – that means making it ordinary and sterile and lacking in glory and lacking in valour,” said Russell Brand, the actor turned dissident podcaster, as Jordan Peterson, the psychology professor turned masculinity influencer, nodded in agreement. Brand’s shirt was unbuttoned to his navel, revealing a large cross pendant on his hairy chest. Peterson wore a perplexing suit whose right half was maroon and left half was navy blue. What they were there to fight against, Brand declared, was nothing less than a “globalist and totalitarian scheme to replace God”.

The crowd murmured its assent. A politically diverse group a few thousand strong had come from across the country to attend the Rescue the Republic rally, headlined by the former independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr, who suspended his campaign and endorsed Trump and the GOP ticket last month.

Speakers at the rally also included Republican senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, former Democratic presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard, and a ragtag array of podcasters, substackers, medical dissidents and the heroically cancelled.

Dave Rubin, Bret Weinstein, Rob Schneider, Lara Logan, Matt Taibbi, Jack Posobiec, Robert Malone, Jimmy Dore: a murderer’s row of anti-establishment misfits gathered under the Make America Healthy Again banner that spanned the stage.

Democrats in recent months have taken great satisfaction in labelling their opponents “weird”, and the cross-section of crankery gathered here was a case in point.

Minnesota Governor Tim Walz’s deployment of the epithet struck a chord on the left and was credited with helping Walz land the vice-presidential nomination. Trump responded with indignation, insisting, “They’re the weird ones.”

When Kennedy – an environmental lawyer and longtime anti-vaccination activist who has recently copped to having a dead worm in his brain and leaving a bear’s corpse in Central Park – backed Trump, some Democratic strategists were convinced this would only help them by adding to the “weird” aura and cementing the impression of the Democratic nominee, Vice-President Kamala Harris, as the candidate of the mainstream.

But the Rescue the Republic event was testament to the axis of weird that has assembled to support Trump’s candidacy – a cross-partisan fringe united by little more than conspiratorial contrarianism.

Right-wing libertarians mingled with left-wing peaceniks, tie-dyed longhairs and camo-clad beardos mingling peaceably under the cloudy sky. They are easily dismissed as actors on the political margins, but in an age of anti-establishment distrust, they could be a substantial pillar of Trump’s support.

“Look, I’m an artist. I consider myself a weirdo,” said Carolina Rodriguez, a 39-year-old textile designer from Miami.

“We’re creative. We don’t obey what one side says. That’s how humans should be – we have our own brains.”

Before Kennedy dropped out, Rodriguez had been volunteering for his campaign out of concern about “chemicals in our food”; she used to vote mainly for Democrats, but now is inclined to vote for Trump.

“So many things that used to be considered conspiracy theories turned out to be true,” added Rodriguez’s friend Jennifer Swayne, a 44-year-old substitute teacher from Melbourne, Florida. She cited the CIA’s Project MKUltra mind-control experiments as an example.

A white sheet hand-printed with the words “Blessed Are The Peacemakers” was draped like a cape over the shoulders of her Kennedy T-shirt. “I was a Never Trumper until a few months ago,” she added. “But we have to vote against open borders, censorship, vaccine mandates and endless warfare.”

The speakers onstage articulated a variety of grievances: vaccines, censorship, educational indoctrination, food additives, the Federal Reserve.

The eponymous sponsoring organisation began during the Covid pandemic as “Defeat the Mandates”, then broadened to include opponents of aid to Ukraine. Homemade signs proclaimed “Do Not Affirm / Do Not Comply.”

The stage backdrop proclaimed a nefarious web of industrial complexes: academic, finance, military, immigration, medical.

Kennedy took the stage in the midafternoon, railing against the public-health establishment and pharmaceutical “cartel” that he blames for what he described as unprecedented rates of chronic disease.

Since backing Trump, he has adopted the “Make America Healthy Again” slogan as a Trumpist play on his longtime preoccupations.

“Nobody ever complied their way out of totalitarianism,” he proclaimed, as the crowd chanted, “Resist! Resist! Resist!” and “Bob-by!”

Though Trump hasn’t made any specific promises about including Kennedy in his potential administration, Kennedy assured the crowd that Trump would “bring me into Washington DC,” in order to “reclaim our agencies”.

Gabbard, a former four-term congresswoman from Hawaii, left the Democratic Party in 2022 after years of railing against foreign interventionism and the “deep state”.

A former member of the Army National Guard, she recalled being deployed to Iraq and blaming then-vice-president Dick Cheney for the omnipresent logos of the oil company Halliburton, which Cheney previously led. Now, she noted pointedly, Harris has welcomed Cheney’s endorsement.

“A vote for Kamala Harris is a vote for Dick Cheney!” Gabbard said as the crowd erupted in boos. “A vote for Kamala Harris is a vote for the neo-con warmongers!”

Johnson, the senior senator from Wisconsin, lauded Kennedy as “a man of enormous courage” and said the setting reminded him of Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous address decades ago. “We all have a dream,” he said: “We have a dream that millions of eyes will be opened, that wrong will fail and right will prevail, that truth will conquer evil.”

Whether the coalition of crankery will help or hurt Trump is far from clear. The Trump campaign released a memo on the heels of Kennedy’s endorsement claiming it would boost the GOP ticket, but polling since then hasn’t shown a clear-cut effect.

Trump has long welcomed fringe figures into his orbit, betting that rank-and-file voters are less offended than elites by those polite society deems beyond the pale.

America, after all, has always been a land of conspiracy theorists, nonconformists, questioners of authority, individualists. In a YouGov poll taken last month, 48 per cent of American adults said they considered themselves “very weird” or “somewhat weird”, while 43 per cent said they were “not very weird” or “not weird at all”.

Klayt Morfoot, a 38-year-old medical-equipment repairman, said he became disenchanted after he got out of the military and started listening to Ron Paul, the libertarian former Texas congressman.

The popular podcaster Joe Rogan introduced him to Weinstein and other Covid sceptics, and his curiosity was piqued when their videos were banned from YouTube and Facebook. “What’s the difference between Hillary Clinton and Nikki Haley? They’re both pro-war and anti-free speech,” he said. “I will probably vote for Trump. I think he’s a narcissist billionaire playboy. But they’re trying to kill him for a reason.”

The speakers told the crowd that their coalition of the crunchy left and the militant right was a powerful one – a rebel alliance, a band of “X-Men”, forbidden and subversive and therefore obviously true.

Del Bigtree, an anti-vaccination activist who has promoted the debunked idea that vaccines cause autism, looked out on the crowd and could sense victory on the horizon. “If they could steal this election, they would,” he proclaimed. “But I have news for them: There’s too many of us now.”

The Wall Street Journal