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.) said of the GOP ticket on the final night. “I know a couch commando when I see one,” Rep. Jason Crow (D-Colo.) said minutes later.
The jabs were just part of a more expansive case against Trump that Democrats laid out over four nights in Chicago. But they reflected a broader shift in tone for Democrats toward a no-holds-barred kind of rhetorical warfare many in the party once eschewed. 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. This year’s convention culminated recent efforts to needle Trump on topics known to strike a nerve in the former president.
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.
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. “I guess Obama kind of did!” she said. Next to her, a colleague burst out laughing.
Democrats advanced a multipronged case against Trump at the convention designed to energize their base, win persuadable independents and peel off some former Republicans. They cast him as focused on himself rather than the country and called attention to his record on labor issues; the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol by his supporters; and his nomination of Supreme Court justices who helped overturn Roe v. Wade. Harris and her allies have been spotlighting those themes in paid advertising, contrasting her positions on those topics and promoting her as a steward of personal freedoms.
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.
Trump made clear this week that he was listening to Democrats’ jabs. 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.”
“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. He added, “They always say, sir, please stick to policy. Don’t get personal. And yet they’re getting personal all night long.” He polled his own crowd: “Do I still have to stick to policy?”
“Noooo!” they shouted.
On Thursday morning, Trump called in to “Fox & Friends” with thoughts on Walz’s speech.
“I have to listen to a lightweight like this get up and absolutely lie,” he lamented.
Democrats made fun of Trump throughout the convention. They joked about his repeated references to the fictional serial killer Hannibal Lecter, the suggestions that he fell asleep during his criminal trial (Trump vehemently denied it) and the diagnosis that exempted Trump from military service in Vietnam. “I don’t have bone spurs,” Maryland Democratic Gov. Wes Moore said after recounting how he joined the Army.
The audience broke out in some chants of “lock him up!” — a reference to the “lock her up!” chants that Trump supporters aimed at then-Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton in 2016. It was a gleeful reference to Trump’s conviction this spring on 34 felony counts; he has yet to be sentenced and faces many other outstanding charges. 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. The crowd loved it.
Trump spent the week trying to wrest attention away from Chicago with appearances in battleground states. On Thursday, the final day of the convention, he live-posted through Harris’s speech on social media.
The former president and his advisers suggested that Democrats are focused on Trump at the expense of other issues such as inflation. Democrats said say they are doing two things at once — making a case against Trump but also laying out a positive vision.
Still, Democrats acknowledge that few things unite the party like opposition to Trump. “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.
But not everyone felt compelled to focus on him.
At a Wednesday afternoon gathering for delegates under 35, speakers barely mentioned Trump, focusing instead on their policy dreams for the party — on housing costs, health care, climate change and the Israel-Gaza war.
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.
Jang said he is “trying to channel” that anger.