Trump Auditions ‘Common Sense’ Branding Against ‘Weird’ Taunts

Jeff Green
·4-min read

(Bloomberg) -- Donald Trump cast himself as a purveyor of “common sense” during a trip to Michigan, as he looked to counter a central theme of Democrats’ convention in Chicago: that he and running mate JD Vance are “weird” extremists.

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For Trump, the argument underscores a crucial concern facing his campaign — how to win back voters turned off by frequent forays into culture wars and a proclivity for embracing divisive figures and movements. The critique from Democrats has also complicated the Republican candidate’s own efforts to paint his opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, as herself outside the mainstream.

“I am not a radical at all. I’m just a common-sense person that was successful,” Trump said Tuesday at the Livingston County, Michigan, sheriff’s office, where he met with law enforcement and sought to frame the vice president as weak on crime.

The resonance of attacks from Harris and running mate Tim Walz underscores the challenge Republicans face. Walz first popularized taunting Trump and Vance as “weird,” and the attack has gained traction among Democrats who long had instead offered high-minded criticism of the former president as an existential threat to democracy.

While Trump rarely engaged with that critique, he’s made his annoyance with the “weird” critique clear in recent days.

“I like to say the Republican Party is now the party of common sense. Conservative? Yeah, I guess conservative. It doesn’t matter,” Trump said. “We want to have, we want to have a good life. We want to be safe.”

Trump’s attempts to brand himself as sensible and level-headed come as he’s stepped up attacks on Harris, painting her as “a radical left lunatic” and “incompetent.” The barrage of attacks has come as Harris has cut into Trump’s polling lead and has refocused the media spotlight on her after President Joe Biden dropped out of the race last month.

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White Supremacist Ties

Trump’s choice of venue for Tuesday’s event threatened to undercut his attempts to separate himself from extremism. The rally was held in Howell, Michigan, the same city where white supremacists gathered last month. About a dozen masked individuals marched through the city’s center last month chanting “Heil Hitler” and hung signs with Nazi symbols from highway overpasses.

The town has several historical ties to extremist activity and the Ku Klux Klan. A KKK leader in the 1970s lived near the town, and cross burnings and other hate demonstrations have cropped up in the area repeatedly for decades.

The Trump campaign in a statement downplayed Howell’s history and said that the former president speaks out against “hate of any form.” And Trump himself responded brusquely when asked about the town’s history, noting that Biden visited the town too in recent years.

“Who came here in 2021,” he said, before walking out of the room.

Still, Harris’ campaign seized on the significance of the location and resurfaced Trump’s prior brushes with extremist activity.

“Today, Donald Trump refused to condemn white supremacists who marched in his name,” Harris spokesperson Sarafina Chitika said in a statement. “Instead, the 34-time convicted felon lied about crime, which skyrocketed on his watch, about policing, which he tried to defund, and about the January 6 insurrectionists who attacked police officers defending our Capitol at his behest.”

Livingston County Sheriff Mike Murphy, who hosted the Trump event, put out a video the day before where he addressed the racist event and said that the participants were from out of town and didn’t reflect Livingston County views.

Messaging Strategy

The Republican nominee’s visit to Michigan on Tuesday is part of a week-long blitz taking him to key swing states in a bid to draw attention away from the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.

Trump will also visit North Carolina and Arizona, with his surrogates holding daily press conferences near the DNC — a bid to paint a contrast with Harris, who has not yet held a sit-down interview since becoming her party’s nominee. Harris has pledged to do so by the end of the month.

Trump’s allies have urged the president to be more disciplined in his messaging, focusing on voters’ policy priorities, including the economy, immigration and crime, instead of personal attacks.

Despite Trump’s advisers structuring campaign events to focus on inflation, manufacturing and crime, he has leaned into insults about Harris’ intelligence and ethnicity, calling her “stupid” and questioning her Black identity. Some Republicans have warned that could harm him with moderate voters.

--With assistance from María Paula Mijares Torres.

(Updates with additional Trump, Harris campaign comments in paragraphs 10-13. A previous version corrected a date reference in the first paragraph)

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