When It Comes to Trump, Harris Tries Lightening Up

Over the last eight years, Democrats have treated former President Donald Trump as a confounding boogeyman — a figure who poses such a grievous threat to democracy that they sometimes won’t even say his name.

But in Atlanta, as Vice President Kamala Harris soaked up the enthusiasm of a 10,000-person crowd last night, she did something a little different when her remarks turned to Trump: She smiled.

Harris sounded almost gleeful as she told the crowd she knew his type from her days as a prosecutor. She quoted the book of Quavo, the rapper, as she assailed Trump’s efforts to block a bipartisan border deal, declaring that he “does not walk it like he talks it.” And she grinned as she dared Trump to debate her, reveling in the delivery of her biggest applause line of the night.

“If you’ve got something to say,” Harris said as the crowd roared, “say it to my face.”

Forget the Age of Enlightenment. Harris appears keen to lead her party into the Age of Lightening Up — to cut through the years of Trump-related burnout by presenting herself as a happy warrior willing to cut him down to size and bring the rhetoric about him back to earth.

While at certain moments Harris treated Trump as a punchline, in others she listed concrete freedoms that she said were under assault from the former president, including the freedom to vote and the freedom “of a woman to make decisions about her own body” — a line she uttered while almost seeming to point to herself.

Her ebullient tone made for a sharp contrast from Trump’s contentious and combative appearance at the National Association of Black Journalists this afternoon, where he lashed out at reporters and suggested that Harris was not really Black.