If Dire Warnings Won’t Stop Trump, Democrats Figure Mockery Might

The passing of the torch from President Biden to Vice President Kamala Harris has been accompanied by another change: the reintroduction of humor.

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Barack Obama and Michelle Obama seemed determined to get under Donald Trump’s skin with their speeches on Tuesday night.

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 Biden, the party built up Mr. 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.

The shift appeared meant to zero in on one of Mr. 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 Mr. Trump, singeing him over the Republican Party’s recent obsession with affirmative action and its latest incarnation, diversity, equity and inclusion. In Ms. Obama’s hands, it was Mr. 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 Mr. Trump’s golden escalator in his Manhattan tower.

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