At the 2016 Democratic Convention, just months before Donald Trump was elected to office, Michelle Obama delivered a searing but compassionate address to her fellow party members, urging the left to be better than bullies on the right. “When they go low, we go high,” she famously said, in what has become a rallying cry for the party in the ensuing years. But Michael Avenatti, the Stormy Daniels lawyer who’s just announced he’s considering a 2020 presidential run, marched to a different tune at the Democratic Wing Ding fund-raiser on Friday night.

“We must be a party that fights fire with fire,” Avenatti said, the audience cheering, according to The New York Times. “When they go low, I say hit back harder.”

He did note, though, that Trump voters shouldn’t be considered the enemy, and that the Democratic Party should reach out to those whose support of the president may have soured. They should be thought of “not as evildoers but as victims of a great con,” he said. “Decent people get conned all the time, and let’s face it, Trump is a very good con man.”

While Avenatti tried out plenty of familiar politician phraseologies—mentioning “good-paying jobs,” the American Dream, Roe v. Wade, and ended his remarks by saying we ought to “make America decent again”—his speech was peppered with the kind of pugnacious doomsday proclamations the left has come to expect from the other side. The Democrats are “fighting for no less than the survival of our republic,” against “a man that wants to turn back the hands of time, to send us back to the Dark Ages . . . we must honestly ask ourselves whether those that we fight for can afford our gentleness,” he said. It remains to be seen if other Democratic challengers will echo his combative tone.