This genius website captures Trump’s weirdest debate quotes
Donald Trump has said his fair share of strange things. “If Ivanka weren’t my daughter, perhaps I’d be dating her,” the Republican candidate proudly told hosts of The View in 2006. “My fingers are long and beautiful, as are various other parts of my body,” he claimed to Page Six in 2011. “[Kim Jong Un] wrote me beautiful letters and they are great letters, and we fell in love,” Trump explained to followers at a rally in 2018. Unfortunately, most of the American public now recognize these very real quotes as just par for the course for the former president, whose so-called Trumpisms are frequent enough to warrant their own Wikipedia entry. Now, in advance of tonight’s presidential debate between Trump and Democratic candidate Vice President Kamala Harris, there’s a platform cataloging all of Trump’s strangest quotes in real time. The Weird Button is a new microsite created by the grassroots collective Creatives for Harris. It currently displays a selection of 22 egregious and nonsensical instances of Trump-speak, sourced from news headlines, YouTube videos, and C-SPAN transcripts. Users can rotate through the quotes by clicking on a reaction button, which then plays audio of Harris and running mate Governor Tim Walz saying “weird.” The site will be updated after the debate with Trump’s oddest quotes from the event. [Screenshot: weirdbutton.com] It’s a clear play on the Democrats’ recent strategy to brand the GOP and its pundits as fringe and out of touch, boiling down their rhetoric to the simple word “weird.” The Trump quotes also draw a stark contrast between Harris and Trump’s speaking styles as Republicans try to get a new opposition-messaging strategy—Harris speaks in “word salad”—to catch on. The platform is just the most recent endeavor from Creatives for Harris, an organization of volunteer creative professionals, founded in August, to support the Harris campaign through pithy design initiatives. Their past projects have included Insults for Good, a collection of merch based on conservative jabs directed at the Harris-Walz ticket (like a set of “Tampon Tim” sticker sets), and Blank for Harris, a custom logo-generating tool. Creatives for Harris isn’t affiliated with the actual campaign, but proceeds—and free advertising—go toward supporting Harris’s run for the presidency. On the Weird Button site, a call-out saying “Don’t let weird win” points users to Harris’s fundraising page, as well as a link to register to vote. [Screenshot: weirdbutton.com] To make the Weird Button feel “of the moment,” designer and freelance associate creative director Charlie Fingal says, the team opted for a lime green aesthetic inspired by Charli XCX’s brat album, which has become a central meme for the Harris-Walz campaign. The site’s UI centers around one feature: its clickable button. “It’s the good kind of ‘weird’ with a very in-your-face color palette,” Fingal says. “We wanted the button itself to feel ‘weird,’ too. And after a lot of exploration, we ended up with the slimy, oddly satisfying green blob that you see now.” During the debate, the Weird Button’s rotating list of quotes will disappear, and on screen only the button will be visible, so users can click while watching to react to any “real-time weirdness,” says one of the page’s designers, Louie Spivak, who also works as a freelance associate creative director. [Screenshot: weirdbutton.com] “It’s simple: Keep the site open on your phone and smash the Weird Button any time Trump says something, well, weird,” Creatives for Harris cofounder and marketing strategist Jonathan Jacobs says. It’s also strategic. Post-debate, Creatives for Harris will scour the weird-button clicks data to figure out which Trump moments viewers thought were the strangest, and then publish a report on its findings. The site isn’t a one-off activation, it’s also a call and response that gives Creatives for Harris fodder for more opposition content to use down the road. From a branding perspective, that’s anything but weird. It’s actually pretty smart.
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Donald Trump has said his fair share of strange things. “If Ivanka weren’t my daughter, perhaps I’d be dating her,” the Republican candidate proudly told hosts of The View in 2006.
“My fingers are long and beautiful, as are various other parts of my body,” he claimed to Page Six in 2011.
“[Kim Jong Un] wrote me beautiful letters and they are great letters, and we fell in love,” Trump explained to followers at a rally in 2018.
Unfortunately, most of the American public now recognize these very real quotes as just par for the course for the former president, whose so-called Trumpisms are frequent enough to warrant their own Wikipedia entry. Now, in advance of tonight’s presidential debate between Trump and Democratic candidate Vice President Kamala Harris, there’s a platform cataloging all of Trump’s strangest quotes in real time.
The Weird Button is a new microsite created by the grassroots collective Creatives for Harris. It currently displays a selection of 22 egregious and nonsensical instances of Trump-speak, sourced from news headlines, YouTube videos, and C-SPAN transcripts. Users can rotate through the quotes by clicking on a reaction button, which then plays audio of Harris and running mate Governor Tim Walz saying “weird.” The site will be updated after the debate with Trump’s oddest quotes from the event.
It’s a clear play on the Democrats’ recent strategy to brand the GOP and its pundits as fringe and out of touch, boiling down their rhetoric to the simple word “weird.” The Trump quotes also draw a stark contrast between Harris and Trump’s speaking styles as Republicans try to get a new opposition-messaging strategy—Harris speaks in “word salad”—to catch on.
The platform is just the most recent endeavor from Creatives for Harris, an organization of volunteer creative professionals, founded in August, to support the Harris campaign through pithy design initiatives. Their past projects have included Insults for Good, a collection of merch based on conservative jabs directed at the Harris-Walz ticket (like a set of “Tampon Tim” sticker sets), and Blank for Harris, a custom logo-generating tool. Creatives for Harris isn’t affiliated with the actual campaign, but proceeds—and free advertising—go toward supporting Harris’s run for the presidency. On the Weird Button site, a call-out saying “Don’t let weird win” points users to Harris’s fundraising page, as well as a link to register to vote.
To make the Weird Button feel “of the moment,” designer and freelance associate creative director Charlie Fingal says, the team opted for a lime green aesthetic inspired by Charli XCX’s brat album, which has become a central meme for the Harris-Walz campaign. The site’s UI centers around one feature: its clickable button.
“It’s the good kind of ‘weird’ with a very in-your-face color palette,” Fingal says. “We wanted the button itself to feel ‘weird,’ too. And after a lot of exploration, we ended up with the slimy, oddly satisfying green blob that you see now.”
During the debate, the Weird Button’s rotating list of quotes will disappear, and on screen only the button will be visible, so users can click while watching to react to any “real-time weirdness,” says one of the page’s designers, Louie Spivak, who also works as a freelance associate creative director.
“It’s simple: Keep the site open on your phone and smash the Weird Button any time Trump says something, well, weird,” Creatives for Harris cofounder and marketing strategist Jonathan Jacobs says.
It’s also strategic. Post-debate, Creatives for Harris will scour the weird-button clicks data to figure out which Trump moments viewers thought were the strangest, and then publish a report on its findings. The site isn’t a one-off activation, it’s also a call and response that gives Creatives for Harris fodder for more opposition content to use down the road.
From a branding perspective, that’s anything but weird. It’s actually pretty smart.
