Donald Trump is in free fall. Read this description from Sunday’s Washington Post of how the GOP nominee spent last week: “[A]ides did not want a situation where he was watching the convention every night, getting angry, and then just golfing all day and stewing, according to people who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private interactions. Trump also had grown annoyed with the news coverage that depicted him as not working as hard as his opponent, one person who talked to him said.”
If you didn’t know that the article was about Trump and you just read it cold without knowledge of the context, you might think it was a description of parents trying to figure out how to handle an ungovernable four-year-old. So they convinced Trump to get out of Bedminster and hit the road, trading suck-ups with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. In the past, Trump has called Kennedy the “dumbest member” of the Kennedy family and a “radical left lunatic.” Kennedy has called Trump a “terrible human being” and “probably a sociopath.”
Will RFK’s endorsement get Trump a few votes? It might. But these two unprincipled freakos deserve each other, and if it ever looks like RFK might matter, all Kamala Harris and Tim Walz have to do is say something like that.
Harris’s campaign so far has been a work of genius on several levels, but maybe the most ingenious stroke of all has been the decision to mock Trump—to present him not only as someone to fear but also to ridicule. Harris perfectly encapsulated this two-pronged attack in these memorable lines from her acceptance speech: “In many ways, Donald Trump is an unserious man. But the consequences—but the consequences of putting Donald Trump back in the White House are extremely serious.… Just imagine Donald Trump with no guardrails.”
But the emphasis has been on ridicule (Tim Walz’s “weird” comment, Maryland Governor Wes Moore’s jab at Trump’s bone spurs, Barack Obama’s hilarious hand gesture when he was talking about Trump’s obsession with crowd size). It’s great on three levels. The first is that it must drive Trump nuts, and when he goes nuts, he says especially nutty things. Second, it’s arguably more persuasive to swing voters than calling Trump a fascist. Trump is a fascist, make no mistake. But he’s also ridiculous. Mocking him over his Hannibal Lecter obsession will stick in apolitical people’s minds far more strongly than warning about his plans to wreck the Justice Department, and in its way, it’s just as disqualifying. Do we really want a president who thinks an eater of human flesh, however fictional, was misunderstood?
And third and most of all: Sustained ridicule has the potential to reinforce the downward spiral Trump is now in. He probably likes it when we call him a fascist or authoritarian, because it expresses fear of him, and he aches to be feared. It acknowledges his power. This motivates him and makes him stronger.
Ridicule makes him weaker. Ridicule makes him small. Ridicule makes him desperate. He’ll try to respond with ridicule of his own, but he is not a clever man. He’s a stupid man. He has no wit. He has no sense of mischief. He doesn’t read. He doesn’t think beyond first reactions. These nicknames of his, which the press has made such a big deal of over the years—they’re nothing. They’re dick contests put into words. Little Marco, Sleepy Joe. There’s nothing remotely clever about any of them.
And now he reportedly thinks he’s come up with a great one in “Communist Kamala.” Well, it’s alliterative, I’ll give him that. But I doubt very much that it’ll play beyond the base. First of all, people under 40 barely know what a communist was. Even for older people who do know, is communism the specter it once was?
And besides all that, it’s not remotely true. She’s a mainstream liberal. The righties went nuts over the price gouging business, but of course, they exaggerated it and lied about it. The plan, while not terribly detailed, says nothing about imposing a huge new federal bureaucracy to set prices. It would more likely empower the government to go after selected firms during emergencies, like laws that are already on the books in 34 states. I’m pretty confident she can handle that in a debate.
And by the way, rebutting charges of communism is one of many spots where freedom and patriotism and all that convention flag-waving should come in handy. These are clubs Republicans have swung at Democrats for decades, and Democrats have rarely been smart enough to figure out a way to snatch those clubs from Republicans’ hands, until now.
People have said, and even I have written, that Trump is bound to regain his footing at some point. I guess so. But what if he doesn’t? What if this new dynamic is just … the dynamic? Against Joe Biden, Trump looked credible to swing voters, simply because of Biden’s age. Against Harris, he looks old (because he is), confused (because he is), far less intelligent than she (because he is), and less genuinely patriotic (because he is).
And the best way to ensure that he stays off his game? Mockery. Bone spurs. Orange tanning spray. Hannibal the Cannibal. Sharks versus electrocution. The whole nine yards. The Democrats have finally found Trump’s true Achilles’ heel. They need to keep poking at it, hard.
