Donald Trump just got invited into my little club and I don’t like it at all.
When I met my wife Amanda she was a mental health professional who had been drawn to the profession quite naturally. She loves the oddballs, the geeks, the creatives, and the artistic. She loves listening to unusual stories and being surprised by new ideas.
Her friends were all interesting people. Outside the box, on top of the world, in the race, on the spectrum, in the wilderness, just all over the shop interesting people.
It wasn’t until after our romance, after we were married, after we’d settled into our big plan that I realized…
In marrying me she had crowned me king of the oddballs in her world.
I’ve always been pretty happy with my lot in life. My weirdness is curiosity. It just won’t let me be. I’m sure there is no cure. It means relentlessly taking things apart to see how they work and often not being able to put them back together again. It means wondering all the time, about everything. It means being distracted. A lot. It means taking a lot of time to think over even the most brief encounter or experience. Ten to one seems to be the ratio. It means being filled with doubt. It means believing almost everything I hear people say, even when it’s mean, and then taking way too much time to think about how it could be true even if all the facts go the other way. Most of all it means never having the luxury of either not thinking, which I imagine a quiet bliss, or going with the crowd and stream of popular opinion, which I imagine must be so much fun.
But I’m happy enough with my lot in life.
So it’s bothered me immensely that in the last few weeks, unintentionally I think, that this whole Donald Trump is weird business has come up, because it’s forced me to look at him, and weirdness in a new light.
Aren’t the Weird Ones the Unlikely Heroes Who Make Life Interesting?
The world, at its core, is a weird place. We're born into it without a guidebook, each of us trying to carve out a space, figure things out, make sense of the madness. But some people —those delightful, strange, and often misunderstood outliers—seem to be playing by a completely different set of rules. To turn on my friend Tara Sloane’s (a perfectly weird one) song Beautiful, they’re not weird like me. Being weird requires being weird in a special way. It’s not like you can just get a tattoo like everyone else and be weird. Weird doesn’t follow the script, and in doing so, it makes life interesting. These weird ones are the architects of imagination, the dreamers who help us see what lies out ahead beyond our own imaging.
History’s Weirdos
Think of Nikola Tesla, a man who spoke to pigeons and harnessed lightning. Tesla wasn’t your garden-variety inventor. He lived in a whirlwind of ideas, many of which seemed plucked from the future. Alternating current? Radio waves? Wireless communication? The stuff of magic in the 19th century. To most, he was downright peculiar. But without his "weirdness," we might not have the electrical grid that powers our daily lives. Tesla wasn’t just ahead of his time—he was playing a different game entirely.
Another eccentric: Salvador Dalí. His curled mustache alone was enough to turn heads, but it was his mind that painted reality into dreamscapes. His surrealist works bent time, space, and perception, forcing us to confront the fact that reality is, at best, subjective. Dalí showed us that it's okay to be a little bizarre—that creativity often blooms in the strangest of gardens.
And what about Mary Shelley? She was a young woman when she crafted Frankenstein, a novel that went far beyond a mere horror tale and grappled with the essence of creation and destruction. She dreamt up a creature from the dead long before modern science could even fathom such a thing. Shelley was ahead of her time, and her work reminds us that our darkest imaginings can illuminate society's deepest questions.
Then there's Andy Warhol, who transformed the every day into the extraordinary. Cans of soup, celebrities, and mass-produced culture were his muses. He helped us see what the world had become. Warhol’s Pop Art movement redefined what we consider "high" art, proving that even the most mundane objects could be drenched in meaning. Some might have called his obsession with repetition and celebrity culture strange, but Warhol wasn’t afraid to let his freak flag fly—and in doing so, he made art feel accessible, even playful. He saw the world as it really was even as we all went along with modernity.
Not even a shortlist of oddballs would be complete without mentioning Albert Einstein, a man who redefined how we see the universe. He wasn’t the polished, buttoned-up academic—Einstein was a scruffy, scatterbrained genius who doodled, played violin, and pondered the nature of time and space in ways no one had ever done before. He upended everything we thought we knew about the universe with his theory of relativity. Weird? Absolutely. Necessary? More than you know.
And what about those who shaped not only the future but the quirky joy of the present? Dr. Seuss. His whimsical, often nonsensical books taught generations of kids (and adults) that being different is wonderful. His characters—who hopped on pop, ate green eggs and ham, or tried to stop Christmas from coming—are the embodiments of that special kind of weird that makes the world brighter.
The truth is, it’s these oddballs—these unapologetically strange, eccentric, and imaginative people—who remind us that there’s no one right way to live a life. They push the boundaries of what we think is possible, showing us the endless potential of the human spirit. Their weirdness is contagious; it makes us ask questions, think differently, and see beauty in the unexpected.
Weirdness is also Democratic
You don’t need to be a world-changing inventor, painter, or scientist to embrace your inner oddball. We all have a bit of weirdness inside us. Maybe you like eating peanut butter on pizza, or you collect old maps for fun. Maybe you believe in aliens or spend your weekends reading obscure historical novels. It doesn’t matter what your brand of weird is—what matters is that it’s yours.
In a world that sometimes feels obsessed with celebrity, newness, and the kind of shock that grabs headlines, fake news, fake weirdness, it’s easy to forget that the genuinely weird people—the Teslas, the Dalís, the Einsteins, the Seusses—are the ones who shake things up and make life a little more exciting. Today’s pop stars, at heart are all pretending to be weird in the exact same way, with the exact same shockingly conformist line of talk. They remind me that it’s difficult to really be different, that imagination is a gift, and that the future is shaped by those weird enough to think outside the box.
Here’s to the weird ones—the dreamers, the mad scientists, the artists with heads in the clouds who don’t toe the line of the latest political ideology. You may never quite fit in, but that’s the point. Life’s a little weird, and we’re all a little weird. Thank goodness for that.
But where does it leave Donald Trump?
Is he weird? We’re often so short on words we’ll just pick out any lying around and use them like Corb Lund says about the crappy carpenter who uses vice grips for pliers, pliers, for a wrench, a wrench for a hammer and hammers everything else.
I don’t see Donald Trump as weird. I don’t think he’s in the club, not even with the man who walks his dog all day long in my neighbourhood let alone the Lex Friedmans and Elon Musks of the world.
So what is Donald Trump?
There’s a tell. My Grandmother used to say that the fox thinks all the other animals in the forest are foxes in disguise. It seemed an odd thing to say when I was eight but now it’s a secret weapon that comes in handy. It’s the people who are always concerned about being lied to who are lying. It’s the ones who “hate gossip” who are the most torrid gossip, it’s the political leader who talks the most about loving peace who is most likely to start the war.
I think Donald Trump is a Businessman. All Businessman.
I get to travel for work. In many Eastern European and Asian contexts, the term "businessman" can carry a more pejorative or negative connotation than in Western countries, where it's often associated with ambition and success in a Zero Sum Game where someone always has to lose. Historically, in regions transitioning from communism to capitalism, "businessman" came to represent figures who, through opportunism or dubious methods, rapidly accumulated wealth and power during periods of economic chaos or deregulation.
In these contexts, a "businessman" might evoke someone who is:
- Corrupt: Engaging in shady deals, bribery, or exploiting loopholes to gain an advantage.
- Exploitative: Focused on self-interest, often at the expense of workers, public welfare, or ethical norms. Phony, fake, self-inflated, cynical, overbearing, bullying. An “all for me, none for you” kind of person.
- Oligarchic: Tied to political elites and systems, using influence to manipulate markets or maintain control through informal networks.
- Opportunistic: More concerned with quick profit or personal gain than contributing to the greater good or fostering sustainable business practices.
Applying this to Donald Trump’s public persona, you could say that in some circles, particularly in countries with more skepticism toward free-market capitalism, Trump might be viewed as embodying this more pejorative "businessman" archetype. His style of wealth accumulation, bold self-promotion, and political maneuvering could be seen as leveraging personal advantage over ethics or societal benefit, reinforcing the perception of the businessman as someone who exploits systems rather than operates within them for the broader good.
In this light, Trump might be characterized not just as a "businessman" in the Western sense of success and entrepreneurial spirit but as a tycoon or mogul—someone seen as self-serving, even if charismatic, whose methods may provoke both admiration and suspicion. There’s nothing weird about that. He’s telling us the answer. He says it right out. He’s a businessman.
Lovely, insightful piece. Now do Harris isn’t a Communist.