Michelle Obama is being widely applauded for delivering a devastating takedown of Donald Trump in a speech at the Democratic national convention.
The former first lady artfully lampooned Trump and belittled his exploitation of race for political gain in a 20-minute speech that was greeted ecstatically by Democratic delegates in Chicago, her hometown.
“For years, Donald Trump did everything in his power to try to make people fear us. His limited, narrow view of the world made him feel threatened by the existence of two hard-working, highly educated, successful people who happen to be Black,” Obama told the gathering, referring to Trump’s well-known hostility to the presidency of her husband, Barack Obama, including promoting a false conspiracy theory that he was born outside the US.
Trump also recently used the expression “Black jobs” in a televised debate with Joe Biden in June to describe the economic threat he claimed was being posed to African-Americans by illegal migrants.
“I want to know, ‘Who’s going to tell him?’” asked Michelle Obama in her speech. “Who’s going to tell him that the job he’s currently seeking might just be one of those Black jobs?’” – a response that provoked prolonged cheering at the convention, and praise on social media.
It was far from her only stinging jibe at Trump. She also turned the tables on him by using the term “affirmative action” – a phrase normally applied to government-mandated racial quota schemes, much criticised by rightwing Republicans – to allude to the former president’s inherited wealth as the son of a successful property magnate.
Praising Harris, she said: “She understands that most of us will never be afforded the grace of failing forward. We will never benefit from the affirmative action of generational wealth.”
In another delicate sideswipe, she appeared to parody the former president’s famous descent down a golden escalator in Trump Tower in 2015 to launch an earlier presidential campaign, by referring to the obstacles many Black and other Americans encounter in their everyday lives.
“If we see a mountain in front of us, we don’t expect there to be an escalator waiting to take us to the top,” Obama said.
She even gave a passing nod to her own previous “we go high” statement – made in a speech at the 2016 Democratic convention – by casting Trump as insignificant and suggesting his approach was to “go small”.
“Going small is never the answer,” she said. “Small is petty, it’s unhealthy and, quite frankly, it’s unpresidential.”
The New York Times described Obama’s change of tack as moving from “When they go low, we go high” to “when they go low, we call it out”, while Rachel Maddow on MSNBC praised her for “one of the best convention speeches I’ve ever seen by anybody in any circumstance … because it was subtle and deep and thought provoking and surprising … Just a stunning speech.”
Commentators also noted Obama’s deployment of mockery and put-down humour in an apparent effort to demystify the Republican candidate – an approach seemingly consistent with that of Tim Walz, the Democratic vice-presidential nominee, who has branded Trump and his fellow Maga Republicans as “weird”.
The term has been picked up by pro-Harris campaigners and has gradually superseded the Democrats’ earlier message of fear over what a second Trump presidency would do to the country’s democratic institutions.
Politico characterised her approach to Trump – and Barack Obama’s in a speech immediately following hers, where he appeared to make an anatomical allusion to Trump’s obsession with crowd size – as “make him small”. Biden’s campaign, by contrast, had long attempted to cast the Republican as such a powerful figure that he could be a threat to democracy itself.
Barack Obama picked up on his wife’s theme of disdain with his own fusillade of putdowns of a political opponent whom he famously antagonised by mocking at a 2011 White House correspondents dinner, an occasion often credited with energising Trump to run for president.
“This is a 78-year-old billionaire who hasn’t stopped whining about his problems since he rode down his golden escalator nine years ago,” the former president said.
On the prospect of a second Trump administration, he said: “We don’t need four more years of bluster and bubbling and chaos; we have seen that movie before – and we all know that the sequel’s usually worse.”
“Trump, in this telling, is less a diabolical genius than an irritating, grievance-obsessed buffoon,” John Harris wrote in Politico.