“Rot in hell”

| 8:00 pm EST March 4, 2024
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Last night I received an email with the subject line “Rot in hell” and I was surprised to see that it was from the Biden-Harris 2024 campaign. This isn’t how they do things, or would ever do things. But then I checked to see what the email was about, and it was a reminder that Donald Trump spent Christmas Day telling everyone to “rot in hell.”

This is effective messaging at its best. I had honestly forgotten about Trump’s unhinged Christmas Day meltdown, because he’s had so many more unhinged moments since then. But it was really clever of the Biden campaign to pull this moment out of mothballs in order to remind everyone of Trump’s inherent unfitness.

It’s also the latest reminder that the Democrats, at least in this era, are quite good at messaging. The media loves to claim that the Democrats are bad at messaging, in an effort to look equally tough on both sides. And a number of Democratic-leaning pundits love to claim that the Democratic Party is bad at messaging, because they’re trying to make themselves look savvier than the Democratic Party.

But when we actually see the Democratic Party in action these days, we generally get to see a master class in messaging and political savvy. The Biden campaign just managed to use Trump’s own words from three months ago as a way of getting people to stop and read an email aimed at rallying support for 2024. Nice work, Biden campaign.