It really sucks that you’re right but this is a big part of the reality of modern elections. What people don’t seem to get about what you’re saying is that this strategy is not intended to make Republicans vote for Democrats, it’s intended to make them stay home. Their perception of Trump is that he’s a strongman. It doesn’t matter that such a description is hilariously off base. It matters that they believe it. Stand up there and call him a pussy with small hands who can’t swing a golf club to save his life and watch him throw a toddler fit while the country looks on. This has the added benefit of giving idiotic “undecideds” the soundbites they clearly want which just might convince some of them to vote for you.

Is it stupid? Absolutely. Would it work? I honestly think it would.

get up there and have more charisma than him and make him the butt of so many jokes that everyone is straight up laughing at him.

That and be more of an outright Nazi than him. You forget that it’s not just about charisma, it’s about creating a white christian ethnostate. If you can out-Trump Trump, which inherently means amplifying Fascist rhetoric in a folksy charm, but also providing an entertainingly scathing critique of everything not white and rich, then yeah, you’ll win. But otherwise the right will always vote for the biggest Nazi in the room.

Failure to recognize this is a failure to recognize how the right thinks. Fascism isn’t the outlier in the American right, it is the norm. They just don’t like calling it Fascism, they prefer traditional christian values.