Strangely, unaccountably, it began with the word “weird,” which — certainly by Trumpian standards — hardly even counts as an insult.
But for Democrats, who have tried and mostly failed since Donald Trump sailed down the golden escalator in 2015 to find a way to successfully define him, it was a descriptor that stuck.
It turned everyman Tim Walz, a virtual unknown on the national stage, into a vice-presidential nominee.
But more to the point, it paved the way for the Democrats’ weirdly — yes, the word fits — ultra-successful convention that in the words of veteran Washington Post political analyst Dan Balz put Trump in a box that he seems to have no idea how to break out of.
As of today, Kamala Harris is at the center of the political universe, and Trump, who believes in nothing more than the notion that the world should revolve around him, finds himself on the outside, as the butt of jokes, as, you know, a potential loser, as someone who can’t believe what is happening to him.
So, how did this happen?
I’m not sure, but I know it has driven Trump — even by Trumpian standards — more than a little crazy.
At the Republican convention, if you can remember that far back, the faithful came wearing ear bandages and speaking of divine intervention while worshiping at the altar of the iconic assassination-attempt photo. It would have been a successful convention if not for Trump’s rambling, grievance-filled, seemingly endless acceptance speech to remind us that nothing had actually changed.
Want early access to
Mike’s columns?
Subscribe to get an
exclusive first look at
his columns twice a week.
Joe Biden was still the Democratic candidate then — yes, it was that long ago — and Trump seemed heading toward his longed-for restoration.
I’m not a big believer in divine intervention, but what has happened since Biden stepped down is nothing short of miraculous — starting with the stunning transformation of Harris from a vice president with disturbingly low approval ratings into a Democratic rock star and ending, for the moment anyway, with a convention that could hardly have gone better.
We don’t know how long Harris’ momentum can last. There will definitely be bumps. As both Obamas and Bill Clinton wisely counseled, the race will be — to coin a phrase — nasty, brutish and (thankfully) short. The election analysts and the oddsmakers still rate it a tossup. Democrats may be exuberant, but we don’t know what the half life of this exuberance might be.
But here’s what we do know: Harris, the mixed-race daughter of immigrants, has for once turned the tables on — as Balz described him — the alpha male Trump, who is facing the prospect of possibly losing to a, uh, woman. Worse yet, as he sees it, a Black woman.
It’s worth noting that Harris never used the word “Black” in her speech and only once, in describing her mother, used the word woman. She didn’t have to say either. But you have to ask yourself, how did she know that? And in a follow-up, how did she get to be so good — and the speech was definitely good — so quickly?
What we did hear was her we’re-not-going-back mantra — soon to be seen in a Democratic merch store near you — as the response that finally counters Trump’s make-America-great-again slogan.
It also worked — or so she obviously planned — to say that with Biden, whom she mentioned only briefly, out of the race, Trump would now play the role of incumbent. We’ll see if she can still make that concept work when they meet in their Sept. 10 debate.
But the key moment, I think, in Harris’ acceptance speech Thursday night went like this:
“In many ways, Donald Trump is an unserious man. But the consequences of putting Donald Trump back in the White House are extremely serious … Just imagine Trump with no guardrails and how he would use the immense powers of the presidency of the United States. Not to improve your life, not to strengthen our national security, but to serve the only client he has ever had — himself.”
The unserious-but-serious line worked so well because Democrats had used the entire convention to set it up. The notion that Trump serves only himself was set up by Harris’ invocation of her work as a prosecutor, when she represented, as we know from watching “Law and Order,” “the People.”
Where Biden had angrily accused Trump of threatening American democracy, Harris accused Trump of threatening the American people — Democrats, independents and even Republicans. (If you missed former GOP Rep. Adam Kinzinger’s convention speech calling Trump a “weak man pretending to be strong” who “has suffocated the soul of the Republican Party,” you can check it out here.)
The convention was many things, but it was especially one long troll of Trump, with the big guns — both Obamas and both Clintons — making the case repeatedly that Trump is both unserious and seriously dangerous and looking out only for himself.
Clinton said the next time you listen to Trump, “don’t count the lies, count the I’s.” By one count, Trump had 270 I’s in his acceptance speech.
Barack Obama put it this way: “Here’s a 78-year-old billionaire who hasn’t stopped whining about his problems … It has been a constant stream of gripes and grievances that’s actually been getting worse now that he’s afraid of losing to Kamala. There’s the childish nicknames. The crazy conspiracy theories. This weird obsession with crowd sizes.”
At the mention of size, Obama did that, uh, gesture with his hands, and the crowd roared. You know Trump was seething.
And in what was the speech of the convention, Michelle Obama turned back Trump’s line about immigrants taking “Black jobs,” to say, “Who’s going to tell him that the job he’s currently seeking might just be one of those Black jobs?”
None of that would have worked as well if Trump hadn’t been contributing. On his social media site, Trump was doing live commentary as Harris spoke at the convention. He lied about her speech, of course, saying she had called for giving “all illegals citizenship.” He insulted her, of course, calling her a “radical Marxist,” which is apparently the worst kind of Marxist.
And at one point he asked, because he’s Trump, “Where’s Hunter?”
At another, he asked, “IS SHE TALKING ABOUT ME?”
She was, it turned out. When she wasn’t giving a decidedly mainstream Democratic speech — strong on muscular patriotism and marked “USA” chants from the ecstatic convention crowd — she was talking about Trump repeatedly.
Then, because Trump also wanted to talk about himself, he called in to Fox News to complain about Harris, after which he called in to Newsmax. Yes, she is making him completely nuts.
And his convention-night commentary came just days after Trump’s complaint about the Time cover photo of Harris, saying how it made her look like — yes — his wife, Melania. Or was it Sophia Loren? Actually, it was both.
Which he followed, as you may have heard, by saying of Harris that he was “much better looking than her.”
For Trump, none of this is new. It’s no different from the way he has always talked. When Harris introduced herself a month ago as a candidate for president, she said she knew Trump’s “type.” But the truth is, there is no Trump type. No one seriously seeking the presidency has ever been anything like Trump.
Democrats are now calling it weird. For the four days of the convention, Harris and so many others said Trump is not only weird and not only unhinged, but dangerously so, to each and every one of us.
And, finally, Harris made the case that with just more than 10 weeks until Election Day, it’s time everyone took notice.
Mike Littwin has been a columnist for too many years to count. He has covered Dr. J, four presidential inaugurations, six national conventions and countless brain-numbing speeches in the New Hampshire and Iowa snow. Sign up for Mike’s newsletter.
The Colorado Sun is a nonpartisan news organization, and the opinions of columnists and editorial writers do not reflect the opinions of the newsroom. Read our ethics policy for more on The Sun’s opinion policy. Learn how to submit a column. Reach the opinion editor at opinion@coloradosun.com.
Follow Colorado Sun Opinion on Facebook.