Former President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama went for Donald Trump’s jugular in back-to-back speeches at the Democratic National Convention despite the Republican ex-president finally showing a moment of decency toward them.
The one-two punch by the powerful former first couple Tuesday night in Chicago came just hours after the GOP nominee unexpectedly praised his predecessor after years of attempting to delegitimize him.
‘I happen to like him. I respect him, and I respect his wife,’ Trump said in an interview with CNN on Tuesday just hours before their remarks. He also called Obama a ‘nice gentleman.’
It was a sharp turn from Trump who spent years attacking Obama and promoting the birtherism conspiracy theory questioning whether the country’s first black president was born in the United States.
Neither Barack or Michelle Obama held back as they unleashed a series of brutal takedowns of the former president with the former first lady delivering what could be one of the most devastating one lines of the entire convention.
‘Who’s going to tell him that the job he’s currently seeking might just be one of those “black jobs?”‘ she said to thunderous applause in the United Center.
Former President Obama also set the internet into a frenzy with his hand gesture suggesting he was making a crude joke about his successor as he joked about the Republican presidential nominee’s ‘weird obsession with crowd sizes.’
This was not the former first couple who welcomed the Trumps graciously into the White House after the 2016 election despite Trump’s attacks on them.
But their scathing response to the Republican ex-president’s attempt for a second term in the White House was met with thunderous approval from Democrats.
The former first lady blasted the ex-president saying for years Trump ‘did everything in his power to try to make people fear us.’
‘His limited and narrow view of the world made him feel threatened by the existence of two hardworking, highly educated, successful people who also happened to be black,’ she said.
She accused him of being the ‘same old con’ and blasted his ‘ugly, misogynistic, racist lies.’
In his own remarks moments later, Obama slammed Trump for ‘whining about his problems since he rode down his golden escalator nine years ago.’
‘We don’t need four more years of bluster and chaos. We’ve seen that movie – and we all know that the sequel is usually worse,’ Obama said.
The 44th president compared Trump to a neighbor running a lief blower every day: ‘from a neighbor, that’s exhausting. From a president, it’s just dangerous.’
The gloves were off and neither Obama was embracing the words of the first lady at the convention in 2016 when she said ‘when they go low, we go high.’
Michelle Obama warned that Vice President Kamala Harris, the first woman of color nominated for the top of a major party presidential ticket was about to face the same criticism, she and her husband faced.
‘Now, unfortunately, we know what comes next. We know folks are going to do everything they can to distort her truth,’ she said before torching Trump.
She urged Democrats on Tuesday night to work ‘like our lives depend on it’ ahead of Election Day and heaped praise on ‘my girl’ Harris.
Her speech came just one day after President Biden spoke at the convention after his dramatic exit from the presidential race just one month ago, but the former first lady did not mention him. She was solely focused on moving forward.
President Obama did mention Biden, calling his decision to choose the current president to serve as his vice president back in 2008 was one of his best decisions.
‘History will remember Joe Biden as an outstanding President who defended democracy at a moment of great danger,’ he said. ‘And I am proud to call him my President, but I am even prouder to call him my friend.’
From there Obama turned his wrath on the ex-president.
‘It has been a constant stream of gripes and grievances that’s actually been getting worse now that he is afraid of losing to Kamala,’ he said. ‘There’s the childish nicknames, the crazy conspiracy theories, this weird obsession with crowd sizes.’
Obama accused Trump of seeing power as ‘nothing more than a means to his ends.’
Before claiming he respected Obama on Tuesday, Trump over the years has called his predecessor everything from a ‘disaster’ and ‘catastrophe’ to falsely claiming Obama was not born in the United States.
He also spent his four years in office attempting to undo some of Obama’s biggest legislative achievements – most prominently efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act or Obamacare.
Trump responded to the blistering criticism of him at the convention in a conservative radio interview on Wednesday morning.
‘I was mentioned at the Democrats’ little party that they have going on in Chicago, and it’s pretty sad,’ Trump said on The Hugh Hewitt show in response to a question about the ‘rhetoric’ being used against him and the recent assassination attempt.
‘These people are out of control, and they’re ruining our nation. Our nation is going to hell,’ he claimed.