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CHICAGO — For the first time in a long time, Democrats have a presidential nominee in Kamala Harris they are excited about. But they can’t quit Donald Trump. The party’s muscle memory and strategic imperative for bashing him are too strong.
And so, in the opening days of the Democratic National Convention here, this celebration of Harris has turned into a bludgeoning of the former president.
“Until we defeat Trumpism there’s nothing else that really, really matters,” Rep. Ro Khanna of California told reporters after a delegate breakfast on Tuesday. “And if we don’t defeat Trumpism, we’re going to be in a world of hurt, because there could be years of Republicans in charge.”
Over two days in Chicago, Democrats have laced into Trump repeatedly, criticizing everything from his character to his legal problems to his policy proposals, including his management of the Covid pandemic. Former President Barack Obama even joked about Trump’s “weird obsession with crowd sizes.”
And they are quite literally throwing the book at him. Michigan state Sen. Mallory McMorrow on Monday brought with her on stage a hulking Project 2025 book — an oversized prop, visible from the cheap seats of the arena, designed to amplify the Heritage Foundation’s controversial blueprint for the next Republican administration that Trump has sought to distance himself from. A different speaker is bringing out the book every night, with Pennsylvania state Rep. Malcolm Kenyatta trotting out the over 900-page time on Tuesday.
Democrats may no longer be running with President Joe Biden, a candidate whose raison d’etre for the twilight of his political career was to defeat Trump. But their convention is laying bare the party’s calculation that excoriating the Republican standard-bearer is a strategy worth sticking with.
Even as Harris told delegates inside the United Center on Monday that “we are moving forward,” her party can’t help but look backward.
“It’s a tricky thing to get the balance right, and I am a firm believer that people rise to the moment that’s in front of them,” McMorrow told POLITICO on Tuesday. “In 2020, it really did feel like this singular goal was to beat Donald Trump, and that meant that it was a lot about education, about democracy and what’s at stake, and what he could do with the second term. And I think now people know that, so that message can only take you so far.”
McMorrow added: “But also, if you want to sustain energy, it has to be fun. You can only tell people how much is at risk for so long, and people get tired and burned out.“
But many Democrats are betting that the threat of a second Trump term remains as potent a motivator for voters — both the party activists at the convention and the millions more Americans watching from home — as it did in 2020. Or when the specter of Trump helped power the party in the midterms in 2018 and 2022.
Over the first two days of their convention, prominent Democrats and rising party stars have used primetime speaking slots to deliver dire warnings about another Trump presidency and to reinforce his character flaws. Obama said Trump “has not stopped whining since he rode down his golden escalator nine years ago.” Former first lady Michelle Obama accused Trump of “demonizing our children for being who they are and loving who they love.”
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer on Tuesday said Trump “peddles in anti-Semitic stereotypes” and “fuels islamophobia.”
Future generations, the highest-ranking Jewish elected official in the country said, “deserve better than Donald Trump’s American carnage.”
And that followed a convention opener on Monday in which United Auto Workers president Shawn Fain, in a moment reminiscent of Hulk Hogan ripping his shirt off at the GOP convention, took off his suit jacket on stage to reveal a red T-shirt emblazoned with the words “TRUMP IS A SCAB.” The union said it had sold thousands of the shirts online since Monday.
Fain told POLITICO that he thinks Harris will win the election because voters will relate to her more than Trump. But, he argued, Harris’ allies have no choice but to counter Trump’s falsehoods — and then he bashed the former president some more.
“In a world where Donald Trump does nothing but put out his alternative facts, or what we all call lies, I believe it’s important that we call him on his lies and that we expose him for what he really is,” he said. “He’s a fraud.”
The anti-Trump strategy employed by Democrats in Chicago reflects a recognition that opposing the former president remains the party’s driving force — and one that may help it to pitch a tent holding everyone from progressive Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) to the Republican “Never Trumpers.” That was especially true when Biden was the party’s presidential candidate.
Now Democrats have a new nominee who has opened her campaign with a more future-focused outlook — Harris called in a rally in Milwaukee on Tuesday for Democrats to “chart a new way forward.”
But Harris has yet to release a significant number of policy proposals. And even as the Democrats’ campaign apparatus works to define Harris to voters, it is doing so in contrast to Trump — arguing that the election is a choice between a prosecutor versus a felon, an elected official who centers service versus one who is all about themselves and a party looking forward versus backward.
Democrats’ primetime attacks against Trump in Chicago also stand as a response of sorts to the broadsides Republicans launched against them at their own convention last month in Wisconsin, where Republicans quickly pivoted from solemnity in the wake of the attempted assassination of Trump to bashing the opposition to score political points.
Trump, campaigning Tuesday in Michigan, tore into Harris on issues of immigration and crime, depicting her as a “lawless Marxist” and accusing her of allowing “hordes of illegal alien criminals to stampede into our country.”
In Chicago, Democrats across more than half a dozen interviews in and around their convention argued that they need to draw contrast with Trump so that Americans understand the stakes of the November election — and because it is what motivates their voters.
Rep. Ann McLane Kuster (D-N.H.), the chair of the center-left New Democrat Coalition who is working with dozens of battleground Democrats in the third straight election with Trump atop the ticket, said candidates need to strike a balance to win over GOP voters in ticket-splitting seats.
Her party’s most potent strategy to do so: Let Trump be Trump.
“Right now, just let him speak for himself, like there’s nothing that we can say that’s even dark enough to get to the place where he is,” Kuster said. “Just let him be, and we will present a more positive view.”
