THE SHORT, STRANGE LIFE OF WEIRD. For a brief moment, every Democratic talker in the United States was calling former President Donald Trump and running mate Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) weird. They're still doing it now, but in the last 24 hours or so, the vogue of weird appears to be dwindling. And that leaves the question: What was that about?

Several press accounts suggest it got started last week when Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN), who just happens to be on presumptive nominee Vice President Kamala Harris's short list for running mate, called Trump and Vance just weird in an MSNBC interview, which the Democratic Governors Association, of which Walz is chair, amplified in a post on X, according to ABC News.

Then the Harris campaign, just days in existence, began calling Trump and Vance weird on every occasion it could. Last Friday, the campaign sent out a press release headlined JD Vance Is a Creep (Who Wants to Ban Abortion Nationwide). The first sentence of the release: JD Vance is weird.

By the weekend, shows on MSNBC and CNN were talking about it, giving Walz credit. The head of the Democratic National Committee predicted victory in November in part because its Republican opponents are weirdos. Later, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D-MI), who pulled herself out of the vice presidential pool, claimed the weird talking point was breaking through because of the Republican agenda and the way they address people, it is bizarre. It's weird. It is weird. ... And weird is a kind of a funny phrase to use because it's bizarre.

Since Vice President Kamala Harris became the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, her campaign and allies have rolled out a new line of attack: former President Donald Trump and his running mate J.D. Vance are weird.

The credit for the new narrative reportedly goes to Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, who labeled the GOP ticket as such on MSNBC last week, and on CNN on Sunday.

Now, it's all Democrats are talking about, as Grabien Media's Tom Elliott showcased in a supercut posted Monday.

The weird characterization is reportedly an effective line of attack, political analysts claim.

Of all the attacks Kamala Harris's team could have launched against Donald Trump's VP pick, J.D. Vance, calling him weird, was probably the worst choice. If Vance has a quirk, it's his millennial bluntness, but anyone who has any experience hanging out with millennials -- particularly millennials on the right -- it's a pretty common trait that I would argue is a necessary counter to the multi-generational penchant for political correctness on the left.

I'm struggling to see anything weird about Vance, and I'm not just saying that because I plan to vote for Trump, but I have no doubt that leftists absolutely do find him weird, and I can confidently say that this actually reveals more about the left's mentality than it does the right's.

It's become the Democrats' go-to taunt for their opposition.

Jesse Lee, a former senior official in the Obama-Biden White House, tells Vanity Fair that the revived messaging matches the candidate.

There's definitely more of an energetic and kind of feisty attitude, Lee says of Harris's aura compared to President Joe Biden's. I think it's a smart recognition that part of how people vote, understandably, is kind of personality and just overall headspace. They don't know every single detail of every single policy, but they have a sense of people. When you look at somebody like JD Vance...once the weirdness gets into the bloodstream and gets into the ether, everything sort of starts to feed into it. You start to see it everywhere you look. And that's really the most effective kind of narrative and framing you could do, where it takes on a life of its own and people start to see things through that lens.

So far, at least, Trump-Vance has been incapable of finding an effective response, Karpf said.

Harris has been beating the weird drum since at least 2018, when, CNN reported, she was confronted with the idea of debating Trump in a hypothetical 2020 run. During prep, she pondered how she'd respond if Trump reprised how he behaved during his debate with Hillary Clinton in 2016, stalking back and forth and lurking over her shoulder.

Harris said she'd simply turn around and ask him, Why are you being so weird?

One former party official says the word sums up how Republicans are acting right now.

So the Harris team thought it might be better to just dump the big, serious Biden campaign theme in favor of... weird. There are those who argue that weird itself is a serious message. The Atlantic's David Frum suggested that it was a shrewd campaign appeal directed at millions of women, who will get the anti-Trump, pro-Harris message even if Trump supporters don't. Weird is code for expresses obsessive hostility to women, including the women in his own personal life, Frum wrote, and because MAGA Republicans don't get the code, they don't understand why they are losing the argument.

Harris's campaign and surrogates have effectively turned the entire GOP into a meme, with creators like Minnesota governor Tim Walz, whose name has been bandied about as a potential Harris VP pick, gleefully lampooning the right in press hit after press hit.

It's in the framing: Banning abortion and limiting the messages doctors can share with patients sound like insurmountable policy issues that little old me wouldn't be able to impact. These guys being in your exam room? Ick. Weird.

In any event, now, although it's never a good idea to speak too soon, it appears the weird wave might have crested. Some Trump supporters started posting images of the Biden administration's celebration of transgenderism, men dressed in women's clothing reveling on the White House lawn, alongside photos of Vance and his family with the caption JD Vance is weird. That led to other sorts of pushback on the weird theme. And then the Harris campaign released its first big ad, and it was an entirely conventional case for her candidacy -- no weird, no memes, just a straight old-fashioned campaign commercial. And now weird doesn't seem to be popping up every second on some media outlets and in social media. So maybe we are approaching the point where it all seems overdone. And then, voters can hope, the campaign can move on to being a campaign.