Yoopya with The Conversation
In her speech accepting the Democratic nomination for president, Vice President Kamala Harris addressed her opponent, former President Donald Trump – not with scorn or outright condemnation but, as columnist Peter Nicholas put it, by taking a “cheekier tone.”
“In many ways, Donald Trump is an unserious man,” Harris said, adding: “but the consequences of putting Donald Trump back in the White House are extremely serious.”
In Trump’s first term, Harris implied, there were adults in the room to serve the Constitution and protect America from the president’s worst impulses. But those adults abandoned Trump because of his contempt for both the Constitution and the country.
“Just imagine Donald Trump with no guardrails,” Harris said, “and how he would use the immense powers of the presidency of the United States. Not to improve your life, not to strengthen our national security, but to serve the only client he has ever had: himself.”
Trump, for his part, didn’t know how to respond.
“IS SHE TALKING ABOUT ME?” Trump squawked on Truth Social.
Yes, she was.
‘Weird’
Harris’s convention jab at Trump was the most prominent example of her campaign’s strategy of attacking Trump by dismissing him not as an existential threat to democracy – although his critics continue to use that line of attack – but as “a bumbling, cartoonish figure who’s not so much fearsome as he is laughable,” as Nicholas put it.
Trump’s running mate, U.S. Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, appears no more serious than Trump, warning Americans of the existential threat of “childless cat ladies.”
Harris’ running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, described the GOP ticket as “just weird.”
Walz later elaborated in a speech by calling Trump and Vance “weird and creepy as hell,” garnering laughter and applause.
Hillary Clinton, who lost the 2016 presidential election to Trump, added: “If Republican leaders don’t enjoy being called weird, creepy and controlling, they could try not being weird, creepy and controlling.”
Is ridicule Trump’s Achilles’ heel?
The Democrats have discovered and exploited what Michael Tomasky, writing in The New Republic, said in August 2024: Ridicule is Trump’s Achilles’ heel.
Trump has no one to blame but himself for people kicking him in the rear. He was, after all, the one who put the “kick me” sign there.
“I hate when people laugh at me,” he said at a July rally.
Did he not think others were listening?
Long before Harris took the convention stage, other Democratic speakers were openly mocking Trump, perhaps none more effectively than former first lady Michelle Obama.
Obama, perhaps knowing that the best way to make an ass out of someone is to quote him directly, responded to Trump’s statement that immigrants were taking what he called “Black jobs.” She reminded Trump that both his predecessor in the White House and his Democratic opponent are Black.
“Who’s going to tell him that the job he’s currently seeking might just be one of those Black jobs?” she asked.
She then characterized Trump as petty, insignificant and small.
“Going small is never the answer,” she said. “Small is petty, it’s unhealthy and, quite frankly, it’s unpresidential.”
The convention crowd laughed loudly with Michelle Obama – and at Trump.
Michelle’s husband, former President Barack Obama, also referred in his speech to Trump’s constant whining. “There’s the childish nicknames, the crazy conspiracy theories, this weird obsession with crowd sizes,” Obama said, and then moved his hands toward each other until they were a couple inches apart.
Obama then took a moment for the audience to grasp the suggestive positioning.
This may have produced the loudest laughter of the convention.
It was reminiscent of Obama’s monologue at the 2011 White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, when the then-president ridiculed Trump, who was sitting in the crowd, for several minutes.
Obama had been pressured into releasing his birth certificate to silence Trump’s long-standing – and baseless – claim that Obama was not born in the U.S.
Never wrestle with a pig in the mud
In our 2020 book “The Art of the Political Putdown,” my co-author Will Moredock and I said an insult could be a potent political weapon because it could establish one’s superiority over a rival. In the dog-eat-dog world of politics, nobody wants to end up as the fire hydrant.
But there’s a downside to insulting your rival. The late U.S. Sen. John McCain of Arizona, the GOP presidential candidate in 2008, summarized the pitfalls of engaging in name-calling. “Never get into a wrestling match with a pig,” McCain said. “You both get dirty – and the pig likes it.”
In his column, Nicholas said that other Democrats, including President Joe Biden, have “ascribed … an outsized importance” to Trump by characterizing him as, in Nicholas’ words, the “leader of a dark political movement bent on trashing democratic traditions.”
Tomasky said that Trump likes being called “a fascist or authoritarian because it expresses fear of him, and he aches to be feared. It acknowledges his power.”
Trump, as he’s stated, doesn’t like being laughed at.
“Ridicule,” Tomasky added, “makes him weaker. Ridicule makes him small.”
If Trump had concerns about the widespread criticism of him as a wannabe dictator, why did he pick as his running mate Vance, who once called Trump “America’s Hitler”? Trump knows that nobody ever laughed at Hitler or Vladimir Putin.
Ridicule reduces him from the dictator and tyrannical bully that he imagines himself to be. It exposes him not as he wants to be but as he is.
Author:
Chris Lamb | Professor of Journalism, Indiana University
