Chicago.- How to attack former President Donald Trump?
It’s a question that has plagued Democratic Party strategists for nearly a decade.
Hillary Clinton called him “the dangerous Donald” and a racist. President Biden uses dangerous and idealistic terms to describe him as a danger to American democracy.
Vice President Kamala Harris is trying something different: deflating it.
The first two nights of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago have been used as a sharper focus of the lenses through which Harris and her allies intend to frame Trump between now and Election Day.
In slick videos shown to delegates and in speech after speech, a series of attacks emerged.
Harris is the agent of future-oriented change and Trump is the stagnation in the past. He has been using a long-standing deception against Americans that has already passed its expiration date.
The goal of Harris’s anti-Trump message is to try to undermine her opponent in order to outdo him, minimize him, and disconnect from him to avoid being dragged into reacting to his every provocation.
He is de-emphasizing Trump’s racist remarks and moving away from portraying him as a threat to democracy, instead focusing on painting Democrats into a portrait he believes will resonate with voters: Trump as a fraud and an evildoer who cares only about himself and his billionaire friends.
The attacks are designed not only to win applause from the convention but also to win votes.
The goal is to erode Trump’s support among undecided voters 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.
Harris and her allies are calling Trump a populist fake worker and anti-union scab who has shown himself to be selfish to a degree that is uncharacteristic of an American.
Harris’ surprise appearance on the first night of the convention seemed straight out of her opponent’s playbook, a Trumpian, theatrical touch that electrified the venue.
The video that preceded his entrance set the tone and imagery for the path forward of his campaign, and illustrated his attempt to take American property and patriotism away from Republicans.
The video that played in the arena opened with a sweeping image of horses galloping across open plains, the giant screen flashing with symbols of American greatness: six Marines raising the flag at Iwo Jima, the Statue of Liberty, the moon landing and images of the American flag.
The tone of the video was youthful and optimistic, jumping from one jubilant pro-Harris crowd to the next. It showed Trump as the dark, ugly past and Harris as the bright future.
It ended with the narrator mentioning Trump’s legal troubles: “This is the choice we have: choose a prosecutor or a criminal.”
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