In her speech accepting the Democratic nomination for president, Vice President Kamala Harris addressed her opponent, former President Donald Trump – not with contempt or outright condemnation, but, as columnist Peter Nicholas put it, by a “cheeker tone”.
“In some ways, Donald Trump is an untrustworthy man“, Harris said, adding: “But the results of Donald Trump returning to the White House are extremely serious.”
During Trump's first term, Harris said, there have been adults within the room who served the Constitution and guarded America from the president's worst impulses. But these adults Trump abandoned due to his contempt for each the Constitution and the country.
“Imagine Donald Trump without railing,” Harris said, “and how he would use the immense powers of the President of the United States. Not to improve your life, not to strengthen our national security, but to serve the only client he ever had: himself.”
Trump, for his part, didn’t know the right way to react.
“IS SHE TALKING ABOUT ME?” Trump screamed on Truth Social.
Yes, it was.
'Strange'
Harris's jab at Trump throughout the convention was probably the most outstanding example of her campaign's strategy of attacking Trump by dismissing him not as an existential threat to democracy – although his critics proceed to make use of that line of attack – but as “a clumsy, cartoonish figure which is just not a lot frightening as ridiculous,” as Nicholas put it.
Trump's running mate, U.S. Senator JD Vance of Ohio, doesn’t appear to take the matter any more seriously than Trump and warns Americans of the existential threat posed by “childless female cats.”
Harris' running mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, described the GOP ticket as “just funny.”
Walz later expanded on this in a speech, describing Trump and Vance as “strange and scary as hell”, which was met with 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 may try not being weird, creepy, and controlling.”
Is ridicule Trump’s Achilles heel?
The Democrats discovered and exploited what Michael Tomasky wrote in The New Republic in August 2024: Ridiculousness is Trump’s Achilles heel.
Trump has nobody responsible but himself for people kicking his ass. After all, he was the one who put the “Kick Me” sign there.
“I hate it when people laugh at me,” he said at a rally in July.
Didn't he think others were listening?
Long before Harris took the convention stage, other Democratic speakers had openly mocked Trump, and maybe none more effectively than former First Lady Michelle Obama.
Obama, perhaps knowing that the perfect approach to ridicule someone is to cite them directly, responded to Trump's statement that immigrants would take what he “Black jobs.” She reminded Trump that each his predecessor within the White House and his Democratic opponent are black.
“Who will tell him that the job he’s currently in search of is likely to be one in all those black jobs?” she asked.
She then characterised Trump as petty, insignificant and narrow-minded.
“Getting smaller is never the solution,” she said.Small is smallit’s unhealthy and, quite frankly, unpresidential.”
The audience on the convention laughed loudly with Michelle Obama – and at Trump.
Michelle's husband, former President Barack Obama, also referred to Trump's constant whining in his speech. “There are the childish nicknames, the crazy conspiracy theories, this weird obsession with crowd size,” Obama said, then moved his hands toward one another until they were a number of inches apart.
Obama then gave the audience a moment capture the suggestive positioning.
This probably caused the loudest laughter in Congress.
It was paying homage to Obama’s monologue on the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner in 2011, when the The then president mocked Trumpwho sat in the group for several minutes.
Obama was put under pressure his birth certificate to silence Trump’s long-standing – and unfounded – claim that Obama was not born within the USA
Never wrestle a pig within the mud
In our 2020 book “The art of political denigration,” my co-author Will Moredock and I said an insult is usually a powerful political weapon because it could possibly reveal one’s superiority over a rival. In the cutthroat world of politics, nobody desires to find yourself as a fireplace hydrant.
But there’s a downside to insulting your rival. The late U.S. Senator John McCain of Arizona, the 2008 Republican presidential candidate, summed up the pitfalls of insulting. “Never get into a wrestling match with a pig,” McCain said. “You each get dirty – and the pig likes it.”
In his column, Nicholas said other Democrats, including President Joe Biden, “attributed an oversized importance“ towards Trump, characterizing him, in Nicholas’ words, as “the leader of a sinister political movement bent on throwing democratic traditions in the trash.”
Tomasky said that Trump enjoys being called a “fascist or authoritarian since it expresses fear of him, and he longs to be feared. It is a recognition of his power.”
Trump, as he himself has said, doesn’t like be laughed at.
“Mockery,” Tomasky added, “makes him weaker. Mockery belittles him.”
If Trump was fearful about widespread criticism of him as a would-be dictator, why did he select Vance as his running mate? 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 he believes himself to be. It exposes him not for who he desires to be, but for who he’s.
image credit : theconversation.com