CHICAGO — If Democrats can’t make the nation fear Donald Trump, they have decided that perhaps they can persuade voters to laugh at him instead.

For more than four years, under the leadership of President Joe Biden, the party built up Trump as a supreme threat: powerful, brutal and, if not invincible, at least supremely resilient — like some kind of comic-book mutant who couldn’t stay slain.

Then, over the course of two ebullient nights at the Democratic convention in Chicago, on Monday and again on Tuesday, party leaders old and new tried a new tack. They made fun of their foe, relentlessly, mercilessly and almost always with a good laugh.

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The shift appeared meant to zero in on one of Trump’s best-known vulnerabilities: If there is one thing he cannot countenance, it is not being taken seriously.

On Tuesday, Michelle Obama, the former first lady who once famously declared, “When they go low, we go high,” took a blowtorch to Trump, singeing him over the Republican Party’s recent obsession with affirmative action and its latest incarnation, diversity, equity and inclusion. In Obama’s hands, it was Trump, the son of a rich real estate developer, who was afforded the luxury of “failing forward,” through “the affirmative action of generational wealth.”

“If we see a mountain in front of us, we don’t expect there to be an escalator waiting to take us to the top,” she said, allowing the audience to recall Trump’s golden escalator in his Manhattan tower.

Obama appeared to relish the moment. “For years, Donald Trump did everything in his power to try to make people fear us,” she posited, because “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.”

And then came the punchline: “Who’s going to tell him the job he’s currently seeking might just be one of those Black jobs?” It was a double whammy, mocking Trump not only for saying in a ham-handed appeal for Black votes last month that immigrants were taking “Black jobs,” but also for possibly losing to a Black woman — a second category of humans who have faced Trump’s contempt.

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But it was her husband who delivered the evening’s coup de grâce, as he mocked “a 78-year-old billionaire who has not stopped whining about his problems since he rode down his golden escalator nine years ago.”

“There’s the childish nicknames,” Barack Obama continued, “the crazy conspiracy theories, this weird obsession with crowd sizes,” and at that, he held his hands by the microphone, close together in a diminutive gesture, with only a few inches between them. He looked down at his hands, paused, then let the crowd make its own judgment about what he had meant.

And judge they did, with uproarious, raunchy laughter, all aimed at the man who otherwise looms for Democrats as the destroyer of democracy and the end of America as we know it.

The Obamas were hardly the only ones on the convention stage or in the Democratic Party at large who have belittled Trump. Even before he was picked as Vice President Kamala Harris’ running mate, Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota first began describing the Republicans of the Trump era as just plain weird.

And it wasn’t just the Obamas who appeared determined to get under Trump’s skin. Gov. JB Pritzker of Illinois, the heir to the Hyatt Hotel fortune whose family name is plastered all over greater Chicago, went at one of the former president’s most cherished points of pride — and also one of his most tightly guarded secrets: his wealth.

“Take it from me, an actual billionaire,” Pritzker said, “Trump is rich in only one thing: stupidity.”

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The line was all the more striking since he had taken the stage just after Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., had dedicated much of his speech to laying into “the billionaire class.” For Pritzker, it was a label he was willing to embrace, as long as it was at Trump’s expense.

Republicans did have a response of sorts. The Trump campaign released a statement ignoring the mockery and sticking with their line of attack that “Kamala Harris is a pro-criminal radical.” Before Obama actually delivered his speech, Michael Whatley, the chair of the Republican National Committee, had blasted out a prebuttal, which clearly did not anticipate where the former president would be going, with his words or his hands.

“Democrats want to evoke memories of 2008,” Whatley wrote, “but this isn’t Barack Obama’s Democrat Party — Kamala Harris is even more dangerously liberal.”

And with that, the tables had turned. Republicans had become the party warning of the looming dangers that would come with their opponents’ victory.

Democrats were just laughing it off.

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This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

By Jonathan Weisman/Todd Heisler
c. 2024 The New York Times Company