The Obamas’ Approach to 

Trump: Make Him Small

...Donald Trump established that he was not a novelty candidate but the leader of a slavishly devoted political movement — Democrats commonly have excoriated him as a figure of singular menace.

This rhetoric was nothing if not sincere. But the denunciations also gave Trump something he craved and used to powerful effect: They validated that he was a large and historically consequential figure. To call someone singular, even in his iniquity, is a way of building him up...

Trump, in this telling, is less a diabolical genius than an irritating, grievance-obsessed buffoon — like “the neighbor who keeps running his leaf blower outside your window every minute of every day,” as Barack Obama put it.

He is less a singular historical figure than a wearily familiar one—entirely at home in a long tradition of American demagogues...

The effects of Trump’s politics are not a laughing matter, the Obamas made clear, but Trump himself is — a whining, insecure loudmouth whose act has grown stale.

Both speeches were replete with lines trying to make Democratic nominee Kamala Harris’ opponent seem pathetically small.

Both speeches — while filled with stinging one-liners that thrilled partisans inside the United Center — seemed plainly written with a particular strategic theory in mind...to disempower him.

This theory is quite different than the one that guided President Joe Biden...

...Harris’ theory of the case is. ...a template for making him seem more prosaic...a larger case she and vice presidential nominee Tim Walz are making — putting less emphasis on the threat he poses to democracy...

He [Barack] mocked Trump’s penchant for “childish nicknames and crazy conspiracy theories and weird obsession with crowd size,” moving his hands narrowly together in a way that made his point unmistakable: Trump’s obsession with size must be infused with sexual insecurity.