Barack Obama and Michelle Obama at the second night of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Yuri Gripas/Abaca/Sipa/AP
The below article first appeared in David Corn’s newsletter, Our Land. The newsletter comes out twice a week (most of the time) and provides behind-the-scenes stories and articles about politics, media, and culture. Subscribing costs just $5 a month—but you can sign up for a free 30-day trial of Our Land here.
Back in the Before Times—when Joe Biden was the Democrats’ 2024 presidential nominee—I had some advice for the fella for his debate with Donald Trump: Employ strategic derision. Here’s how I put it:
Like most bullies, Trump cannot bear humiliation. His whole act is an act. He pretends to be strong and the best in everything—with the “best words” that come from a “very, very large brain.” But his malignant narcissism is clearly interlaced with deep insecurity. Real stable geniuses don’t have to brag about being stable geniuses. Trump might best be attacked not with frontal assaults about his lies, shortcomings, and misdeeds but with mockery. One goal Biden ought to have during the debate and afterward is to provoke Trump into the most erratic Trumpish behavior so voters are reminded of the perils of placing this guy in charge again. Ridicule can be quite useful in this regard.
Biden, as we all know, was not up to this task when he faced off against Trump in June. It takes a certain sass and a talk-show-host facility to pull off such a maneuver. And it’s best done with a smile or a twinkle in the eye—preferably both. But during the Democrats’ convention, I felt seen—or listened to. Trump was routinely treated with mocking scorn that aimed to portray him as small, weak, and, yes, weird. Yet at the same time, convention speakers effectively highlighted the multiple threats he poses. When it came to balancing the dissing and the warning, the Dems got the mix pitch-perfect.
At their Chicago convention, the Democrats embraced a more positive overarching theme than democracy-could-die. That was freedom—as defined in a progressive manner.
As a candidate for reelection, Biden proclaimed that a Trump restoration could mean the end of American democracy. He noted that this election would determine the United States’ future as a constitutional republic. This was entirely accurate—Trump did try to mount a coup and incited insurrectionist violence—but it was also dark and heavy. And polls showed that Biden’s we-must-fight-for-democracy message that cast Trump as a Voldemort-like character was not resonating. It was not boosting his campaign.
At their Chicago convention, the Democrats embraced a more positive overarching theme than democracy-could-die. That was freedom—as defined in a progressive manner: freedom from government intervention in your most private decisions, freedom to love who you want, freedom from fear of gun violence, freedom to pursue opportunity within a fair economic system. There was overlap with democracy protection. But freedom is a positive and uplifting notion, while focusing thematically on a threat can be a downer. And when it came to the threat Trump presents, speakers deftly executed a one-two punch that combined put-downs of him with alerts regarding the dangers of Trump 2.0.
New York Rep. Hakim Jeffries, the top Democrat in the House, offered a good example with this snarky poke: “Donald Trump is like an old boyfriend who you broke up with, but he just won’t go away. He has spent the last four years spinning the block, trying to get back into a relationship with the American people. Bro, we broke up with you for a reason.” Then Jeffries went on to cite the damage Trump did as president: “Trump was the mastermind of the GOP tax scam, where 83 percent of the benefits went to the wealthiest 1 percent in America. Trump failed our country during the COVID-19 pandemic. Trump is a chaos agent who is focused on himself, not the American people. Trump tried to destroy our democracy by lying about the election and inciting a violent mob to attack the Capitol. Trump put three extreme justices on the Supreme Court who destroyed Roe v. Wade.”
Vice presidential nominee Tim Walz dismissed Trump as a person less mature than the student body presidents he once taught: “Those teenagers could teach Donald Trump a hell of a lot about what a leader is. Leaders don’t spend all day insulting people and blaming others.” But the Minnesota governor also pointed out that Trump and his crew in recent years have threatened to repeal the Affordable Care Act and weaken Social Security and Medicare, and he raised the prospect of abortion bans across the country.
As you will recall, the Obamas went to town on Trump. With several sharp jabs, Michelle Obama depicted him as a narrow-minded bigot.
His limited narrow view of the world made him feel threatened by the existence of two hard-working, highly educated, successful people who happen to be Black. I want to know—I want to know—who’s going to tell him, who’s going to tell him, that the job he is currently seeking might just be one of those Black jobs? It’s his same old con. His same old con. Doubling down on ugly, misogynistic, racist lies as a substitute for real ideas and solutions that will actually make people’s lives better.
And her husband slapped Trump hard.
Here’s a 78-year-old billionaire who hasn’t stopped whining about his problems since he rode down his golden escalator nine years ago. It’s been a constant stream of gripes and grievances that’s actually been getting worse now that he’s afraid of losing to Kamala. There’s the childish nicknames, the crazy conspiracy theories, this weird obsession with crowd sizes. It just goes on and on and on. The other day, I heard someone compare Trump to the neighbor who keeps running his leaf blower outside your window every minute of every day. From a neighbor, that’s exhausting. From a president, it’s just dangerous.
When Obama mentioned Trump’s obsession with crowd sizes, his hand motions indicated this might apply to another size issue for Trump. Yes, an off-color reference from a former president.
When it was her turn, Harris neatly summed up this two-fold approach: “In many ways, Donald Trump is an unserious man. But the consequences of putting Donald Trump back in the White House are extremely serious.” That is, he’s a clown but one who could do real damage. She demeaned him an agent of “chaos and calamity.” Noting that Trump “tried to throw away your votes” and “sent an armed mob to the to the US Capitol, where they assaulted law enforcement officers,” she outlined the possible perils of a Trump return to power: efforts to shower the wealthy with more tax cuts, to gut the Affordable Care Act, to deploy the Justice Department and the US military against Trump’s domestic foes and critics, and to further restrict women’s reproductive rights. In a bit of a schoolyard diss, Harris said, “Get this. He plans to create a national anti-abortion coordinator, and force states to report on women’s miscarriages and abortions. Simply put, they are out of their minds.” And she told her audience, “Just imagine Donald Trump with no guardrails.”
Democrats simultaneously mocked Project 2025 and repeatedly cited the plan as cause to vote against Trump.
Unserious—for a person seeking the most powerful job in the world, that’s quite the insult. The message from all the speeches was that though Trump is a buffoonish egotist who warrants disdain, he nurtures the evil intent of a supervillain.
This strategy of scoff-and-concern was also applied to Project 2025, the far-right and extremist blueprint for a second Trump presidency compiled by the Heritage Foundation and other conservative outfits. Democrats simultaneously mocked it and repeatedly cited the plan as cause to vote against Trump. One night, Saturday Night Live cast member Kenan Thompson appeared onstage—with an oversized edition of the 900-plus-page report—and simultaneously spoofed and skewered it: “You ever seen a document that could kill a small animal and democracy at the same time?”
All of this prevented the convention from becoming an orgy of gloom and doom. One of the themes was joy, and depicting Trump over and over as an all-powerful threat to be feared would have been a buzzkill. Yet the Ds got the tone right by melding humor and concern in the correct amounts.
For years, some Trump antagonists, including the Lincoln Project and George Conway, the onetime Republican and conservative advocate, have pursued the strategy of ridiculing and taunting Trump, believing such actions get under the skin of the failed casino owner and compel him to be even more erratic and nasty. And I’ve thought that Trump is definitely the sort of jerk whose overinflated sense of self—a selling point for some voters—could be punctured with the right jabs. As former Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) zinged the former reality TV celebrity, “Trump is a weak man pretending to be strong. He is a small man pretending to be big. He’s a faithless man pretending to be righteous. He’s a perpetrator who can’t stop playing the victim. He puts on quite a show, but there is no real strength there.”
Exposing that with cheek could be the best way to deflate Trump. The convention did seem to rattle him. On Friday, among the many social media posts he spewed was one that proclaimed, “My Administration will be great for women and their reproductive rights.” Uh, no. He’s already made parts of the United States a hellscape for women. And this post, undoubtedly, would upset his religious right allies who passionately oppose the concept of reproductive rights. Yet something moved him to push back against the weeklong onslaught.
After the Democrats smoothly orchestrated the Biden-to-Harris transition, they mounted a convention that hit almost all the right notes. (Preventing a Palestinian American state representative from Georgia, who was a Harris supporter, from giving a short speech highlighting the plight of civilians in Gaza was a misstep.) And they succeeded in portraying Trump as both a whiny loser and a real threat to the nation. Still, as we are constantly reminded, there are 10 weeks until the election, and—you know the drill—anything can happen. (Particularly this year.)
The next big event on the schedule is the Harris-Trump debate on September 10 to be held by ABC News. I would offer the same advice to Harris as I did to Biden: deride, deride, deride. But it looks as if she got the memo. She’s a former prosecutor who seems to know how to handle this current felon. After watching the Democrats demean and disparage Trump during the Chicago shindig, Trump and MAGA ought to fret about him going mano-a-mano with Harris, who seems to have his number. If Harris follows the example of the convention, American voters might witness quite a spectacle.
