Unstrange

And bizarrely, the speaker — who has long been reviled by House Republicans, and used extensively as a villain in their campaign commercials — is getting GOP backing for the trip. "Speaker Pelosi should go to Taiwan and President Biden should make it abundantly clear to Chairman Xi that there's not a damn thing the Chinese Communist Party can do about it," Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.) said on Monday. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) also backed Pelosi's trip.
The controversy over Nancy Pelosi's Taiwan trip, explained

I don't see what's so bizarre about it. For Republicans, it's a no-lose situation. If Speaker Pelosi backs down, it become ammunition for Republicans to call out the Biden Administration as weak, due to being unable or unwilling to stand up to what clearly appears to be an attempt by the Chinese to bully the United States (especially because it's likely, in the current climate, that China would claim to have cowed the United States into submission). If the Speaker does go, and tensions are ratcheted up to a dangerous point, Republicans can then blame the Democrats for botching the trip. The nature of partisan politics means that Republicans will avoid any blame from their own voters for encouraging the trip. The attack ads write themselves.

It seems like fairly bog-standard partisan politics, with the Republicans taking advantage of situation that it's unlikely the Biden Administration will be able to turn to its advantage. In that sense, it's par for the course, not bizarre. It's possible that Mr. Mathis sees a clearer path to a Biden Administration foreign policy win if the trip goes forward than he lets on, but if so, more explanation was in order.

And so I'm curious as to what audience this article is aimed at. Perhaps there is a fairly large constituency that would find any apparent cheerleading for the other side to be out-of-character, regardless of the potential benefits, but I wouldn't have thought that those people made up the typical readership of a publication like The Week.