After the Elon Musk-Donald Trump rally, there’s a better word for Republicans than ‘weird’

A few months ago, before he was the Democratic nominee for vice-president alongside running mate Kamala Harris, Tim Walz struck gold when he pointed out in an interview just how “weird” the Republican party has become over the past few years.

It was a word that really struck a chord – not just with Democrats, who have struggled to articulate the shift in their opponents’ ideological positions since 2015, but with Republicans as well, who took the slight very, very personally, and didn’t seem to have a response to it.

I mean, how could they, after two of their biggest representatives on the world stage – Donald Trump and Elon Musk – met at a long-anticipated rally in Butler, Pennsylvania on Saturday evening and gave us… whatever that was?

In theory, the event should have been a slam dunk – Trump returning to the site of his attempted assassination, defiant in the face of death, and accompanied by the richest man in the world and “real life Tony Stark” (yes, we really used to call him that).

Instead what we got was the propaganda equivalent of an air ball, as the two men’s combined presence somehow managed to be even less than the sum of its parts – presumably putting us well into negative territory. They spread lies, they inflamed political tensions, and they targeted the vulnerable – all in a day’s work for two men who could afford to pay people to teach them social skills, but instead choose to be the poster boys for “white nationalism, but somehow even stupider”.

At this point, though, you have to wonder if “weird” is the right word anymore. Maybe “embarrassing” would be better. The pictures to come out of the event certainly are – one shows Musk in the middle of a jaunty little half-hop while Trump looks on like a disappointed father; another has Musk leaning in to talk to Trump with a look on his face that reads as “finally, the approval my father never gave me”.

But I know I’m not really being fair, there – people rarely look good in candid photographs. What’s actually embarrassing is that Musk turned up to do the rally at all, after Trump summarily humiliated him on Truth Social, a Trump-owned competitor to Musk’s own terrible website, just two short years ago:

"When Elon Musk came to the White House asking me for help on all of his many subsidised projects,” wrote the former president, “whether it’s electric cars that don’t drive long enough, driverless cars that crash, or rocketships to nowhere, without which subsidies he’d be worthless, and telling me how he was a big Trump fan and Republican, I could have said, ‘Drop to your knees and beg,’ and he would have done it…”

Well, I guess he finally did it, didn’t he? Actually, dropping on his knees and begging would probably have been a little less embarrassing – not just for Musk, who Trump humiliated, but for Trump too, who in holding the rally tacitly admitted that he needed campaign help from somebody he deems “worthless”.

Maybe the word is “disgusting”? That’s the word I’d use to describe Elon Musk’s prediction that “If [Republicans] don’t vote, this will be the last election”. It’s the kind of scaremongering that no democracy should have to weather, but it’s doubly disgusting when it happens at a rally for the guy who oversaw an attempted insurrection at the previous election.

Has Musk forgotten that, of the two candidates, only one has described themselves as a “dictator”? Or that Americans “won’t have to vote anymore” if he wins? I can’t imagine he has, to be honest – if I had to guess, I’d say he’s just talking out of his SpaceX.

Maybe “pathetic” is better? It was certainly pretty pathetic, the way Trump hit the same old tired talking points. Here he played all the hits, treating us to such classics as “Joe Biden is paying for sex change operations for illegal immigrants”, and “my political opponents tried to kill me”. At one point he even boasted about not needing a teleprompter… while reading from a teleprompter.

But I suppose that if I really had to pick just one word to describe the American political right in its current form – one word that summed up all their failings, both ideological and personal – I suppose it would have to be “losers”.

It’s the party of losers like Musk, desperate for validation but totally incapable of earning it. It’s the party of losers like JD Vance, who knows that he can’t actually back up any of his so-called beliefs, and so makes up stories about immigrants eating people’s pets to frighten voters into being on his side. It’s the party of losers like Marjorie Taylor Greene, who seems to sincerely believe that “they” – whoever “they” are – can control the weather.

And hopefully, come 5 November, it will be the party of two-time loser Donald Trump – and we’ll never have to hear any of his weird, embarrassing, disgusting, pathetic ramblings ever again.