Over the last eight years, Democrats have treated former President Donald Trump as a confounding boogeyman — a figure who poses such a grievous threat to democracy that they sometimes won’t even say his name.
But in Atlanta, as Vice President Kamala Harris soaked up the enthusiasm of a 10,000-person crowd last night, she did something a little different when her remarks turned to Trump: She smiled.
Harris sounded almost gleeful as she told the crowd she knew his type from her days as a prosecutor. She quoted the book of Quavo, the rapper, as she assailed Trump’s efforts to block a bipartisan border deal, declaring that he “does not walk it like he talks it.” And she grinned as she dared Trump to debate her, reveling in the delivery of her biggest applause line of the night.
“If you’ve got something to say,” Harris said as the crowd roared, “say it to my face.”
Forget the Age of Enlightenment. Harris appears keen to lead her party into the Age of Lightening Up — to cut through the years of Trump-related burnout by presenting herself as a happy warrior willing to cut him down to size and bring the rhetoric about him back to earth.
While at certain moments Harris treated Trump as a punchline, in others she listed concrete freedoms that she said were under assault from the former president, including the freedom to vote and the freedom “of a woman to make decisions about her own body” — a line she uttered while almost seeming to point to herself.
Her ebullient tone made for a sharp contrast from Trump’s contentious and combative appearance at the National Association of Black Journalists this afternoon, where he lashed out at reporters and suggested that Harris was not really Black.
“All Donald Trump needs to do is stop playing games,” Michael Tyler, her campaign’s communications director, said in response, “and actually show up to the debate on September 10.”
Harris’s approach is also distinct from President Biden’s loftier warnings about the threats Trump poses to the Republic. Some Democrats say the shift was long overdue.
“Voters have been told for years to do what they need to do out of fear,” said Rebecca Katz, a progressive strategist. “What is different about the Kamala Harris campaign, is they are giving people something to vote for, and it’s been a minute since that has happened.”
From ‘unhinged’ to ‘weird’
Much of Biden’s case against Trump was built on warnings: about the mass deportations Trump has said he will carry out, the retribution he has promised and the threat the president said Trump posed to democracy itself.
At one of his final events as a presidential candidate this month in Detroit, Biden described the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021, in detail before evoking a potential second term for the former president in frightening terms.
“Trump is even more dangerous now. No, I’m serious. He’s unhinged. He snapped,” Biden told the crowd. “He says, if he loses, there will be a ‘blood bath.’”
Eric Wilson, a Republican strategist, said stoking a fear of Trump was the best option for a fundamentally unpopular candidate.
“There weren’t people who were excited to go vote for Joe Biden again,” Wilson said. “With Kamala, you have a new candidate that’s largely unknown, and so people are able to sort of project their hopes and dreams onto the candidate.”
On Tuesday, Harris seized the opportunity to do just that. Her team sought to pump up the fun with a night that included a performance by Megan Thee Stallion, who told the crowd, “Let’s get it done, hotties.”
Harris never mentioned Jan. 6. And she called Trump “weird,” delighting the crowd and amplifying an attack that has rocketed around her party as a simple and resonant retort to opponents who have called Democrats names for years.
“The most effective attacks are when it is delivered in plain English and hits the mark,” said Doug Sosnik, a Democratic strategist who worked for Bill Clinton. He added, “Both are true in this case.”
Some Democrats have described the “weird” framing as almost cathartic, one that eased their fears of Trump and his MAGA movement.
Republicans, though, said that those attacks could backfire. Tyler Brown, a Republican strategist, warned that it contained “faint echoes” of Hillary Clinton’s leaked claim that a swath of Trump supporters were in a “basket of deplorables.”
“It came across as ridiculing the voters, as opposed to the candidate,” Brown said.
Trump questions Harris’s racial identity in Chicago
Former President Donald Trump questioned Vice President Kamala Harris’s identity as a Black woman on Wednesday in front of an audience of Black journalists, suggesting his opponent for the presidency had adopted her racial profile as a way to gain a political advantage.
“She was Indian all the way, and then all of a sudden she made a turn and she became a Black person,” he said of Harris, whose mother was Indian American, whose father is Black and who has always identified as a Black woman.
Harris has long embraced both her Black and South Asian identity. She attended Howard University, a historically Black institution, and pledged Alpha Kappa Alpha, the nation’s first sorority established for Black college women. Headlines from her earliest political victories dating back to the early 2000s highlighted both identities.
Trump’s remarks prompted gasps and jeers from the audience at the National Association of Black Journalists in Chicago. The former president’s combative appearance there was one of the most unusual of the campaign so far as he sparred with reporters over diversity efforts, repeated falsehoods about a range of subjects and told the group that he was “the best president for the Black population” since Abraham Lincoln.
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