In response to the rise of Donald Trump and all his attendant child-like nastiness, Michelle Obama said, “When they go low, we go high" at the 2016 Democratic National Convention. And while I appreciate the general sentiment, the past eight years have proven just how ineffective it is to respond to one throat-punch after another with feckless politeness. So I am a fan of Democrats' apparent course correction, which was cemented at this year’s DNC thanks to some memorable, almost Trumpian sex jokes.
On Tuesday night, former President Barack Obama closed out the evening with a thinly veiled, well-timed dick joke, musing about Trump’s “weird obsession with crowd sizes,” while making gestures with his hands. One of his former speechwriters, current Pod Save America bro Jon Favreau, helped write the speech and said in a Thursday episode of the podcast that the line had actually been improvised by our 63-year-old former commander-in-chief.
On Thursday night, the raunchiness continued. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), who responded to a deranged, far-right rumor that she was a nympho-cougar in 2019 with a masterfully cheeky quip, got on stage and said, “Trust Donald Trump and JD Vance to look out for your family? Shoot, I wouldn’t trust them to move my couch.” She delivered the joke after rattling off how awful Trump and Vance will be on economic policies, and if those arguments were slightly forgettable, Warren certainly had the arena’s attention with the joke. (ICYMI: In July, within days of Vance joining the Republican ticket, an online joke about his memoir rapidly worked its way into IRL politics.)
Immediately after Warren, Rep. Jason Crow (D-Colo.), a veteran, took the stage and hit Vance from a similar angle. Following weeks of Republicans trying to invalidate Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Walz’s military record, Crow cited his own and said, "It's not tough talk, it's not chest-thumping. Because, in war, talk is cheap. And trust me, I know a couch commando when I see one." These two couch-fucking jokes come after Walz himself came out swinging at his and Harris’ first rally earlier this month. He said he was excited to debate Vance—that is, “if he’s willing to get off the couch and show up.”
I prefer this rebrand better to the recent Democratic strategy of deferring to Republicans on any number of policy battles for years, and I am fervently hoping that this new-found ruthlessness translates to getting their hands dirty fighting for better policies. But while the moments of levity were a little treat to wash down the business-as-usual stuffiness of political speeches, the DNC’s treatment of activists and its own delegates suggest little else has changed among party leaders beyond a new willingness to trade in dirty jokes.
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