Democrats Use the Convention to Try to Define Trump as a Self-Interested Fraud

How to attack former President Donald Trump?

It’s a question that has tormented Democratic Party strategists for nearly a decade. Hillary Clinton called him “Dangerous Donald” and a racist. President Biden uses grave and lofty terms to describe him imperiling American democracy.

Vice President Kamala Harris is trying something different: deflating him.

The first two nights of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago have brought into sharper focus the lens through which Ms. Harris and her allies intend to frame Mr. Trump from now until Election Day.

In slickly produced videos shown to delegates and in speech after speech, a host of attacks emerged. Ms. Harris is the future-oriented change agent, and Mr. Trump is the stale past. He’s been playing a long con on the American people that has outlived its expiration date.

The goal of Ms. Harris’s anti-Trump messaging is trying to shrink her opponent in order to rise above him, minimizing him and disengaging from him to avoid getting drawn into reacting to his every provocation. There is less engagement on highlighting Mr. Trump’s racist statements or casting him as a threat to democracy, than focusing on a portrait Democrats believe will resonate with voters: that of Mr. Trump as a meanspirited fraud who only cares about himself and his billionaire friends.

The attacks are designed not just to earn applause on the floor of the convention hall but also to win votes. The goal is to erode Mr. Trump’s support among the undecided 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. Mr. Trump, Ms. Harris and her allies are effectively saying, is a fake working man’s populist and an