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Democrats Use the Convention to Try to Define Trump as a Self-Interested Fraud
Speeches and videos seek to shrink Donald Trump in order to rise above him, as Kamala Harris and her allies work to minimize him and disengage from him.
Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan
Reporting from Chicago at the Democratic National Convention.
How to attack former President Donald Trump?
It’s a question that has tormented Democratic Party strategists for nearly a decade. Hillary Clinton called him “Dangerous Donald” and a racist. President Biden uses grave and lofty terms to describe him imperiling American democracy.
Vice President Kamala Harris is trying something different: deflating him.
The first two nights of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago have brought into sharper focus the lens through which Ms. Harris and her allies intend to frame Mr. Trump from now until Election Day.
In slickly produced videos shown to delegates and in speech after speech, a host of attacks emerged. Ms. Harris is the future-oriented change agent, and Mr. Trump is the stale past. He’s been playing a long con on the American people that has outlived its expiration date.
The goal of Ms. Harris’s anti-Trump messaging is trying to shrink her opponent in order to rise above him, minimizing him and disengaging from him to avoid getting drawn into reacting to his every provocation. There is less engagement on highlighting Mr. Trump’s racist statements or casting him as a threat to democracy, than focusing on a portrait Democrats believe will resonate with voters: that of Mr. Trump as a meanspirited fraud who only cares about himself and his billionaire friends.
The attacks are designed not just to earn applause on the floor of the convention hall but also to win votes. The goal is to erode Mr. Trump’s support among the undecided and mostly white middle-class voters in the three so-called Blue Wall states that are likely to decide the election: Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. Mr. Trump, Ms. Harris and her allies are effectively saying, is a fake working man’s populist and an anti-union “scab” who has revealed himself to be selfish to an un-American degree.
Ms. Harris’s surprise appearance on the first night of the convention seemed ripped from her opponent’s playbook, a Trumpian bit of stagecraft that electrified the arena. The video that preceded her entrance established the tone and the imagery of her campaign’s path forward, and illustrated her attempt to wrestle back from Republicans ownership of Americana and patriotism.
The video on the arena’s Jumbotron opened with a wide shot of horses galloping across dusty open plains. The giant screen flashed with symbols of American greatness: six Marines raising the flag at Iwo Jima, the Statue of Liberty, the moon landing, images of the American flag.
Then came the Democratic twist. Beyoncé’s voice rang out: “Freedom, freedom. I can’t move. Freedom, cut me loose.” A deep male voice-over cut in to define “freedom” on Ms. Harris’s terms. “Freedom from control” was paired with an image of a woman standing in front of the Supreme Court, holding up a sign reading “My body my choice.” “Freedom from extremism and fear” was paired with footage of the violent mob that Mr. Trump helped summon to the Capitol on Jan. 6.
The video’s tone was youthful and optimistic, jumping from one joyful Harris crowd to the next. It portrayed Mr. Trump as the dark, ugly past and Ms. Harris as the bright future. And it ended with the narrator’s dig at Mr. Trump’s legal troubles: “That’s our choice: a prosecutor or a felon.”
For Ms. Harris, the most important part of that message is her being defined as a prosecutor — someone who is tough and battle-hardened. The felon aspect pleases the Democratic base, but is seen by Ms. Harris’s advisers as less central to defining Mr. Trump, according to two people with knowledge of their thinking.
Still, felon talk has been a kind of political chum at the convention. Mrs. Clinton, the focus of “Lock her up!” chants by Trump supporters in 2016, smiled broadly when the delegates in Chicago chanted “Lock him up!” on Monday night during her speech. There was a video that parodied the intro of “Law & Order” and ripped Mr. Trump as a lifelong criminal. And there are expected to be two short films on Wednesday night focused on Mr. Trump’s lies about how widespread fraud cost him the 2020 election, and the consequences of his words.
A Trump spokeswoman, Karoline Leavitt, said in a statement that there has never been “a politician as selfless” as Mr. Trump.
“He gave up a comfortable life to save this nation,” she said. “He has been indicted, shot, and slandered and doesn’t give up. He has put his own life on the line to restore American sovereignty and greatness. These Democrats wouldn’t know bravery if it walked into the shower with them. They just want more power for themselves and control over the people.”
One of the most blistering descriptions of Mr. Trump at the convention came from Shawn Fain, the president of the United Automobile Workers, who wore a T-shirt reading “Trump is a scab” that he dramatically showed off after removing his blazer. The word “scab” is the labor movement’s highest insult.
“This election comes down to one question: Which side are you on?” said Mr. Fain on Monday night. Mr. Trump and his running mate, Senator JD Vance of Ohio, are “two lap dogs for the billionaire class who only serve themselves.”
It remains to be seen whether Ms. Harris’s approach is durable enough to survive until Election Day, and whether it can crack the calcified partisanship hardening many voters’ views. Democrats and Republicans agree that Ms. Harris has had a near-perfect four weeks and that Mr. Trump has had one of his worst-ever months in politics. Instead of sharp policy attacks against Ms. Harris, he has flailed about with personal insults, including a ridiculous claim that images of her crowds were fakes generated by artificial intelligence.
And yet, despite Ms. Harris’s uninterrupted run of good fortune, the race remains a tossup. Even though she is the vice president, she remains largely unknown as a political figure, and Republicans will spend hundreds of millions of dollars defining her in the coming weeks as “dangerously liberal” and tying her to Mr. Biden’s most unpopular policies, including on immigration. They will remind voters of the range of left-wing positions she staked out in 2019 when she was briefly trying to be the Democratic presidential nominee.
Back in 2016, Mr. Trump gave Democrats so many potential avenues for criticizing him that winnowing them down proved challenging. Mrs. Clinton ran a campaign focused on trying to recreate President Obama’s winning demographic coalition. As Mr. Trump made misogynistic and race-baiting statements, she and her supporters responded with outrage. That gave Mr. Trump the fight he wanted, allowing him to dominate news cycle after news cycle.
Ms. Harris has learned lessons from Mrs. Clinton’s campaign, people who’ve spoken to her say. It’s unlikely that Ms. Harris will give a speech about the dangers of white supremacy, as Mrs. Clinton did in 2016. Nor will she dwell on the “glass ceiling” aspect of her candidacy, even as Mrs. Clinton did so on Monday night. When Mr. Trump claimed falsely that Ms. Harris only recently embraced her Black identity, she did not take the bait.
Instead of expressing outrage and denouncing Mr. Trump as a racist, the vice president dismissed it as part of a boring and stale act.
“The same old show,” she said at a rally in Texas. “America deserves better.”
And other leading Democrats are delivering that message. On the first night, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez called Mr. Trump a “two-bit union buster” who “would sell this country for a dollar if it meant lining his own pockets and greasing the palms of his Wall Street friends.”
And on Tuesday night, Mr. Obama and his wife, Michelle, echoed that theme in their speeches. Mr. Obama said Mr. Trump was “a guy whose act — let’s face it — has gotten pretty stale” and described him as obsessed with helping himself and his “rich friends.”
Maggie Haberman is a senior political correspondent reporting on the 2024 presidential campaign, down ballot races across the country and the investigations into former President Donald J. Trump. More about Maggie Haberman
Jonathan Swan is a political reporter covering the 2024 presidential election and Donald Trump’s campaign. More about Jonathan Swan
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