Making fun of Trump

With Harris, Democrats try a new tack to take him down

ANALYSIS | AGENCIES | A goal of every presidential campaign is to get voters to size up the opponent and, repulsed, decide, “No way.”

President Joe Biden’s approach was to persuade the electorate that Donald Trump is a national menace. Kamala Harris is instead casting him as Dennis the Menace.

The Harris campaign and her Democratic allies have set out to downsize Trump, pushing the idea that he’s a bumbling, cartoonish figure who’s not so much fearsome as he is laughable. Or as Harris’ running mate, Tim Walz, might say: “weird.”

All week, speakers at the Democratic convention in Chicago lampooned Trump’s fixations. What is it with his focus on crowd size? (More on that later.)

Why does he keep talking about Hannibal Lecter, the cannibal from a horror film that was in the theaters before millions of Americans were born? (Keep reading.)

A video shown at the convention imagined Trump as an offender in the classic TV series “Law & Order,” complete with an unseen narrator intoning: “This is the story of Donald Trump.”

Before he dropped out of the race last month, Biden had depicted Trump as a tower of malevolence — leader of a dark political movement bent on trashing democratic traditions.

A potential downside of Biden’s message is that it ascribed to Trump an outsized importance and risked demoralising voters. If Trump’s grip on the electorate is such that he could end the two-century-old American experiment, perhaps individual voters are powerless to stop him.

Harris is taking a cheekier tone, making the case that Trump’s personality renders him eminently beatable — while having fun doing so.

A news release her campaign sent out this month previewed a Trump news conference at his home in Bedminster, New Jersey, as opposed to his other home in Palm Beach, Florida. It reads like something out of the satiric website The Onion.

“Donald Trump to Ramble Incoherently and Spread Dangerous Lies in Public, but at Different Home,” the release says.

Sen. Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii, said in an interview: “There’s an old saying: Take the job seriously, not yourself. And I think that’s what she [Harris] embodies. We all know this is a serious business. We all know what’s on the line. But just staring voters in the eye and telling them what the stakes are feels like you’re just lecturing.”

The handoff from Biden to Harris was bound to introduce new campaign messages and tactics. They’re two different people, from different parts of the country and with different life experiences. Biden, 81, comes from a courtlier era in American politics. Harris, 59, belongs to a generation and a social set that tend to be more iconoclastic.

“Biden went to the Senate at the age of 29,” said Chris Korge, national finance chairman of the Harris Victory Fund. “People in that body disagreed but were respectful to each other. It’s not within his character to ridicule or make fun of people. It’s not how he fights.”

Harris, he said, is someone with “rock star status” who has shown she’s able “to communicate with younger people.”

While they were serving in the Senate, Harris, Schatz and other generational peers, like Cory Booker, D-N.J., would exchange “sassy texts” poking fun at their “old school” colleagues, he said.

“She’s irreverent and fun and not very self-serious and occasionally sarcastic,” he said. “In a room full of self-serious people, she is among the least. She’s disciplined, she’s smart, she’s prepared — but she manages to be pretty aggressively normal when you sit next to her and have lunch.”

Presidential conventions tend to channel the person at the top of the ticket. This one is no different. One of Harris’ longtime allies is Barack Obama, the former president who left the United Center convulsed with laughter Tuesday night after a sight gag about Trump and … crowd size?

A bit of background. To Trump, the size of his crowds is important. Very important. Maybe all important. So is his anatomy. A CNN headline during the 2016 presidential campaign read: “Trump defends size of his penis.”

In his speech, Obama used a quick hand gesture to suggest the psychological root of what he called Trump’s “obsession with crowd sizes.” Holding his hands a few inches apart, he looked down at them for an instant and then back up.

Did that mean what we think it means?

“We all came to that conclusion,” agreed Korge, who was watching from the audience.

A Trump campaign spokesman, Steven Cheung, said in a statement about the convention: “Kamala Harris and Democrats don’t have any real solutions for all the issues this country faces, so they resort to blatantly false personal attacks. They have nothing to offer Americans.”

Trump has balked at the notion that he’s getting too personal in his commentary on Harris, pointing to Democratic mockery of him as justification for his most scurrilous attacks, like questioning her intelligence, criticizing her looks and speculating about her ethnic makeup.

It’s too early to tell whether Harris’ disparagement of Trump is the path to victory. Still, after one month on the trail, Harris has erased Trump’s edge in the polls. And she has gotten her party into the spirit.

In his speech Wednesday night, former President Bill Clinton said he has been puzzled by Trump’s fascination with Hannibal Lecter, or, as Trump has described him, “the late, great Hannibal Lecter.”

Though Obama dubbed him the “Secretary of Explaining Stuff,” Clinton conceded, “I’ve thought and thought about it, and I don’t know what to say.”

The crowd laughed.

For those who are still wondering, Trump seems to be suggesting that Lecter-like psychotics are among the migrants entering the U.S. illegally. Hannibal Lecter, a fictional movie character, isn’t and never will be available for comment.

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Source: Internet