How Kamala Harris became Donald Trump’s supertroll and found his weak spot

Since the vice president became the Democratic presidential candidate there has been a sharp change of tactic: turn Donald Trump and his team into a laughing stock. Alex Hannaford meets the woman who wrote the playbook that has blindsided the former president

US vice president and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris has made a habit of mocking the former president Donald Trump (Reuters)

A few days ago, a post on Twitter/X from @KamalaHQ, Vice President Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign’s “official rapid response page”, contained a video clip of former president Donald Trump talking about how he’d never been given the credit he deserved for tackling Covid. The caption read: “Trump: I never got credit for COVID” and then underneath “(over a million Americans died and he told us to inject bleach)”. Another post by @KamalaHQ was from Trump’s recent press conference at his Bedminster, New Jersey, golf club. “Trump spends his ‘economy speech’ complaining about Kamala Harris being on the cover of TIME magazine.”

And during last week’s calamitous interview between Trump and Elon Musk on X/Twitter, the Harris campaign trolled him in real time, pointing out that Trump argued climate change wasn’t a problem because he’ll “have more oceanfront property”.

There are sometimes 20 or 30 of these tweets a day — relentless, machine-gun social posting, each one outwardly mocking the opposition, pressing as many of the “look how weird they are being now” buttons as they can. And it’s not just the official social feeds of the Harris campaign either; Democrats on social media are also joining in the fun. Earlier this week, a screenwriter called Eric Champnella posted a video clip he’d spliced together of Trump’s now infamous rambling speech where he discusses sinking boats, batteries and shark attacks with scenes from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. It’s nonsensical, and also very, very funny because after each thrum of Trump’s speech, the inmates in the asylum respond with alarm to his incoherent rambling.

ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST

featuring Donald Trump pic.twitter.com/h7X3cpqVMv

— Eric Champnella (@champnella) June 15, 2024

If there’s one thing Trump is most terrified of, it’s being laughed at and it’s as if the Democrats have suddenly woken up to the former president’s achilles heel. Instead of pitching him as one of the most dangerous men in the world, Trump is being reduced to a king with no clothes. With an eye roll and barely disguised guffaw from Kamala and Walz, he’s exposed; his power diminished and his speeches reduced to viral memes which don’t just have the Democrats laughing, but the whole world too.

It’s now Trump who looks like the old, out-of-touch guy — from strong man to figure of fun in a matter of weeks (Getty/Reuters)

Political strategist Rachel Bitecofer has literally written the book on this new tactic, which is being employed to such effect and causing fury in the Trump camp. Hit ‘Em Where It Hurts: How to Save Democracy by Beating Republicans at Their Own Game, which came out earlier this year, is the ultimate guide to political trolling and has seemingly become the new script Kamala Harris and her newly minted vice-presidential pick Tim Walz.

In the 2022 midterm elections, Bitecofer worked with the Democratic Party to implement what she terms a “negative partisanship strategy”. In her book, she writes: “Voters need to believe this election is a choice for Americans as we confront a new national crisis: the Republican Party — the most dangerous threat to our freedom, health, wealth, and safety” and so, she says, “we have to reinvent the way we communicate”.

Democrats, Bitecofer insists, need to get their earnest heads out of the clouds and go for gut punches the way Republicans do. For too long now, she argues, Republicans, especially Donald Trump, have been winning at weaponising messaging.

“Republicans have an endless supply of dishonest brands for Democrats,” she writes, “convincing Americans that all Democrats are woke, pro-crime socialists who are racist against white people and who want to groom children into sexual deviants. For today’s GOP, inconvenient details like truth no longer matter.”

Bitecofer says it’s time for Democrats to “fight fire with fire. … Less defence, more counter-offence. … take back the most powerful words in American politics by rebranding themselves as the party of freedom and the Republicans as the party of fascism”.

Many of Trump’s supporters believe that the election was stolen from them (AP)

She says you have to look at the huge shift in the early 2000s, to see why a new strategy is needed. Although politics in America has always been divisive and mean, Fox News, the pro-Republican channel created in the mid-1990s by media baron Rupert Murdoch, reaching the height of its influence just as the internet age truly dawned helped create a Frankenstein effect on the Republican electorate. “When you’re pumping all this crazy s*** into people, they responded.”

Alongside this was the so-called Tea Party rebellion, whereby there was a significant shift in Congress, with more ideologically conservative politicians replacing more balanced establishment figures.

Donald Trump used what Bitecofer describes as “the dictator’s playbook” to convince Republican voters that he is the only source of truth even when what he says was blatantly untrue. He of course needed other elected Republicans on board to legitimise his most extreme claims; and go along with it they did. “And all of those guys, including JD Vance”, she says.

“To be in good standing in today’s Republican Party one must be 100 per cent loyal, and uncritically so, to Donald J Trump” she says,” and that includes repeating the falsehood that the election was stolen, even if they know it’s not true.” It’s a post-truth world that Bitecofer calls “a mass psychosis” where “there are millions of people today who believe that [the Dems] stole the election, that [Democrats are] all paedophiles, and that they groom children”.

She says: “We’ve never seen so many millions of people believe in a separate reality where they’re the victim, because everything that Trump says and does and his movement says and does is defensively postured and legitimates or justifies whatever terrible thing they’re trying to do.”

But, with this new tactic of disarming this kind of rhetoric through playground mockery and laughing, are they ditching Michelle Obama’s famous “When they go low, we go high” strategy? Do the Democrats risk becoming guilty of the very same bullying behaviour they purport to abhor?

“No. Because liberals are nice people,” Bitecofer says, adding that she is not suggesting Democrats lie, but that their messaging simply pivots to a new reality. They need, she says, to become “brand ambassadors for common sense as well as freedom, health, wealth and safety”. They can do this, she says by “turning the tables on Republicans, pointing out lies — and yes, nonsensical remarks by Trump, in a much more direct way”.

Who are they laughing at? Second gentleman Doug Emhoff, Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris, Democratic vice-presidential candidate Tim Walz, and his wife Gwen Walz (Getty)

Effective communication, in Bitecofer’s vernacular, means going for the jugular. Just like when Kamala Harris made a speech shortly after announcing her run for the presidency and said, as a former courtroom prosecutor, she “took on perpetrators of all kinds — predators who abused women, fraudsters who ripped off consumers, cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain. So hear me when I say: I know Donald Trump’s type.”

And then there’s Tim Walz, her running mate, who enjoys calling Trump and JD Vance out as“weird”. “Donald Trump talking about the wonderful Hannibal Lecter or whatever weird thing he is on tonight … that is weird behaviour,” Walz said. And soon, “weird” became a buzzword on Democratic Twitter, TikTok and other platforms to devastating (to Vance, anyway) effect.

For a moment in July, the internet was obsessed with sharing jokes about JD Vance having sex with a sofa. It wasn’t true, but as one writer for The Nation pointed out, it certainly “wasn’t the least believable thing we’ve ever heard — RFK Jr did, of course, leave a dead bear in Central Park”, but, they added, ever since Harris became the Democratic nominee, “this has been a meme election”.

While Bitecofer, who lives and works in Oregon and once worked as an election forecaster, isn’t working for Harris’s election campaign in any official capacity, her book is clearly being digested by the people pulling the strings. It got the attention of Jaime Harrison, party chair of the Democratic Party, and Michael Steele, former chair of the Republican National Committee who in 2020 endorsed Joe Biden for president.

“Jaime,” she says, “is evangelical about this book. They have three copies for every state party, I’m going to the DNC [Democratic National Convention] next week. And you know, they’re pushing very hard to get campaigns and state parties to embrace this strategy.”

Doh! Trump seems to be increasingly knocked off course by the Democratic surge (AP)

She’s certainly enjoying watching the strategy, which she believes will be a winning one, play out in real time. “When I set out to do this four years ago, I thought: I’m going to fix the entire Democratic Party’s entire campaign strategy,” she says. “But that’s going to be hard because … I’ll have to teach a bunch of nice people how to be mean. And that’s going to be like teaching a cat to walk on a leash. It’s not natural to us. We are factual people. We respond to a factual argument.”

The memes coming from Harris/Walz HQ are factually correct but they’re funny too. And people like funny, they share funny and they remember funny. The messaging is cutting through in a way the Democrats haven’t seen for a while. It’s now Trump who looks like the old, out-of-touch guy — from strong man to figure of fun in a matter of weeks. People don’t laugh at winners. And Trump knows it.

But could the mocking go too far? During Trump’s interview with Musk, listeners noticed he had a lisp, Trump put it down to a tech issue, but Donald Duck memes weren’t far behind. Not from official Harris or Walz accounts, but it’s something they need to be conscious of. If the roles were reversed and Trump had attacked someone for a speech impediment, Democrats would have been appalled. Hypocrisy isn’t a winning strategy either.

But, for the moment, Bitecofer is done with being nice. And she’s done with the media normalising Maga crazy, as she puts it. “We all knew Donald Trump was going to claim fraud [after the results of the 2020 presidential election were announced] and yet, when he did, instead of saying, yeah, this dude said he was going to do that months ago, the media spent a month disproving what we already knew was bulls***. If we’d have mocked it out the gate, then it wouldn’t have gotten the legs it got.”

It’s an important lesson, Bitecofer says, because she’s convinced it’s going to come up again in November if Trump loses. “We have to laugh at it and treat it like the weird, crazy s*** is. Because when you don’t mock their stupid s***, you legitimise it,” which, in turn, gives it a power it doesn’t deserve.

Memes might seem like mere digital fluff to many, but they are increasingly proving to be an effective tool in encouraging voter engagement. The question is, will this grassroots energy translate into success for Harris and Walz in November? Only then will we know who will have the last laugh.