Jonathan Weisman in the NYT:

If Democrats can’t make the nation fear Donald Trump, they have decided that perhaps they can persuade voters to laugh at him instead.

For more than four years, under the leadership of President Biden, the party built up Mr. Trump as a supreme threat: powerful, brutal and, if not invincible, at least supremely resilient — like some kind of comic-book mutant who couldn’t stay slain.

Then, over the course of two ebullient nights at the Democratic convention in Chicago, on Monday and again on Tuesday, party leaders old and new tried a new tack. They made fun of their foe, relentlessly, mercilessly and almost always with a good laugh.

The shift appeared meant to zero in on one of Mr. Trump’s best-known vulnerabilities: If there is one thing he cannot countenance, it is not being taken seriously….

But it was her husband who delivered the evening’s coup de grâce, as he mocked “a 78-year-old billionaire who has not stopped whining about his problems since he rode down his golden escalator nine years ago.”

“There’s the childish nicknames,” Mr. Obama continued, “the crazy conspiracy theories, this weird obsession with crowd sizes,” and at that, he held his hands by the microphone, close together in a diminutive gesture, with only a few inches between them. He looked down at his hands, paused, then let the crowd make its own judgment about what he had meant.

And judge they did, with uproarious, raunchy laughter, all aimed at the man who otherwise looms for Democrats as the destroyer of democracy and the end of America as we know it.