Vice President Kamala Harris' campaign is pursuing a strategy of attempting to provoke former President Donald Trump with trollish insults about the supposedly diminished size of the crowds at his campaign rallies.

That includes a new campaign ad this week that features former President Barack Obama making a sexually suggestive hand gesture while mocking Trump's "obsession with crowd size," the Daily Mail reported.

The effort is intended to antagonize the Republican nominee with insults about him and his supporters and either elicit an angry response or force him to be defensive about the typically large gatherings he draws.

Harris, Obama insult Trump over his "crowd size"

Ahead of Tuesday's presidential debate on ABC, the Harris-Walz campaign released a new ad titled "Crowd Size" that trolled former President Trump with select video clips that were meant to perpetuate a new narrative from Democrats to denigrate and downplay the size of Trump's rallies.

It included clips from former President Obama's anti-Trump speech at the Democratic National Convention last month, in which he said, "Here is a 78-year-old billionaire who has not stopped whining about his problems," and noted Trump's "weird obsession with crowd sizes" as he drew his hands close together near his waist to insinuate something small while glancing down suggestively.

The ad then briefly went silent with just the sound of crickets chirping as it showed empty seats and a man yawning at a Trump rally before ending with clips of large and enthusiastic crowds at Harris rallies while Obama, from his DNC speech, said, "America's ready for a new chapter. We are ready for a President Kamala Harris."

Harris mocks Trump's rallies

Later that same day, during Tuesday's debate, VP Harris further employed the tactic of trolling former President Trump about his rallies while she avoided answering a question about border security and illegal immigration policy, according to The Hill.

"I’m gonna invite you to attend one of Donald Trump’s rallies because it’s a really interesting thing to watch," Harris said. "He talks about fictional characters like Hannibal Lecter. He will talk about windmills cause cancer."

"And what you will also notice is people start leaving his rallies early out of exhaustion and boredom," she added. "And I will tell you the one thing you will not hear him talk about, is you."

"Let me respond to the rallies. She said people started leaving. People don’t go to her rallies. There’s no reason to go," a visibly perturbed Trump replied, according to the Washington Examiner. "And the people that do go, she’s busing them in and paying them to be there."

The former president added, "People don’t leave my rallies. We have the biggest rallies, the most incredible rallies in the history of politics. That’s because people want to take their country back."

Continuing the crowd size narrative

Fox News reported that the Harris campaign and the Democratic National Committee plan to continue provocatively poking Trump over the size of his rally crowds by way of a mobile billboard that will play the new ad and Harris' comments from the debate while circling the site of a Trump rally in Tucson, Arizona, on Thursday.

Trump has for years boasted of his typically large rallies that last for several hours and draw tens of thousands of devoted attendees, some of whom head for the exits early after the generally day-long event. Harris, meanwhile, held several similarly large rallies of her own amid the initial excitement following her replacement of President Joe Biden as the Democratic nominee, but those events tend to be rather short in duration and questions have been raised about the authenticity of the gathered attendees.