Democrats once strove to ‘go high’ against Trump. Not anymore.

CHICAGO — Barack Obama mocked Donald Trump’s “weird obsession with crowd sizes” at Democrats’ convention here while making a suggestive hand gesture — a throwback to Trump’s old squabbling with a GOP rival about the measurements of his hands and other anatomy. Rep. Pat Ryan (D-N.Y.) declared Trump “fubar,” using a crude military acronym to label him an unsalvageable candidate, while Illinois Democratic Gov. JB Pritzker suggested Trump was inflating his wealth and said, “Trump is rich in only one thing: stupidity.” And multiple speakers delighted the crowd by alluding to the fabricated viral claim that Trump’s running mate, Sen. JD Vance, wrote in his memoir about having sex with furniture. “I wouldn’t trust them to move my couch,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) “I know a couch commando when I see one,” Rep. Jason Crow (D-Colo.) said minutes later. Eight years after the Philadelphia convention cheered Michelle Obama’s famous line “When they go low, we go high” — and with Trump still waging a campaign full of personal insults and baseless accusations, after years of invective that has at times been racist and sexist — some Democrats said they are tired of being polite. Charlene Ligon, 75, a delegate from Nebraska, said when asked about Obama’s crowd size line: “I think that we’re getting in Trump’s head.” She said she talks to many younger Democrats who want a sharper tone against Trump. “They really like the idea of taking it back to the opponent,” Ligon said. Democrats have long wrestled with how to go after Trump, trying strategies ranging from ignoring or dismissing him, as some tried to do early in the 2016 race, to President Joe Biden’s argument that he presents a threat to democracy. Advertisement That shift is evident in prominent Democrats repeatedly calling Trump “weird,” an attack vice-presidential nominee and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz helped popularize; the campaign of Vice President Kamala Harris, the party’s presidential nominee, embracing a fight with Trump over crowd sizes; and prominent Democrats, including Walz, referencing the false couch story about Vance in speeches and internet memes, after years of their party decrying the spread of misinformation. Trump campaign senior adviser Brian Hughes said in a statement that Harris is “running from her years of failed and dangerously liberal policies in the White House that have hurt our country” and that Trump “has an America First agenda to secure our border, restore a thriving economy to make life affordable again, and use peace through strength to bring back stability around the world. ” For her part, Harris took a somber tone against Trump in her Thursday night speech, at times directly challenging his character. She called Trump an “unserious man” and said, “the consequences of putting Donald Trump back in the White House are extremely serious.” She noted Trump’s role on Jan. 6, his fraud conviction in New York and a jury finding of liability for sexual abuse and steered clear of anything crass — as Trump mocks her name and laugh and baselessly questions her racial identity. Advertisement But other convention speakers were “kind of hitting below the belt more than usual,” said Simona Jones, 29, an employee at a racial justice nonprofit who attended with colleagues. “Republicans do it all the time.” “They’re calling him weird,” she added, “but they’re not, like, body-shaming him.” She paused and rethought her remark. (Video: TWP) Democrats advanced a multipronged case against Trump at the convention designed to energize their base, win persuadable independents and peel off some former Republicans. Advertisement Former first lady Michelle Obama said Harris’s opponents were “doubling down on ugly, misogynistic, racist lies as a substitute for real ideas” and criticized Trump more bluntly than she did in her 2016 and 2020 convention speeches. She alluded to Trump’s years-long, false suggestion that the first Black U.S. president was born in Africa. “His limited, narrow view of the world made him feel threatened by the existence of two hardworking, highly educated, successful people who happened to be Black,” she said. “Going small is never the answer,” she said later. But some convention attendees said they detected a willingness to go after Trump in new and less dignified ways, after years of Biden mostly sticking to sober criticisms of Trump’s behavior, especially his disregard for democratic norms. At a Monday rally in Pennsylvania he repeated his objections to Democrats labeling him and Vance “weird,” saying, “I think we’re extremely normal people.” At another rally on Wednesday in North Carolina, he brought Obama up and called his comments “very nasty.” Advertisement “Did you see Barack Hussein Obama last night, taking little shots?” Trump said, returning to his habit of using Obama’s middle name in what many view as a dog whistle meant to falsely portray Obama as foreign. On Thursday morning, Trump called in to “Fox & Friends” with thoughts on Walz’s speech. “I don’t have bone spurs,” Maryland Democratic Gov. Harris has brushed aside occasional “lock him up!” chants at her rallies, saying, “We’re gonna let the courts handle that” — but Clinton gave a smile when they popped up during her speech this week. Former president Bill Clinton took aim at Trump’s age, a topic where Democrats were once on the defensive with Biden. “I’m still younger than Donald Trump!” the 78-year-old said. “Donald Trump has served as one of the best motivators for the Democratic Party and our base and activists,” said Joe Caiazzo, a delegate from Massachusetts. Sungkwan Jang, a 34-year-old New Jersey delegate who helped organize the event, borrowed a line from former Republican House speaker Paul D. Ryan later in an interview: “I think we all understand that we’re not an opposition party, we’re a proposition party.” He did note something that made him especially angry: Trump’s repeated mispronunciations of Harris’s first name, which some Harris supporters see as racist and demeaning. – This Summarize was created by Neural News AI (V1). Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/elections/2024/08/23/democrats-harris-trump-attacks-campaign/