Michelle Obama Takes Donald Apart in a True But Funny Way

 

By Tressie McMillan Cottom

Opinion Columnist

The New York Times

In 2007, a young biracial senator from Illinois named Barack Obama was trying to convince Black voters that he was one of them. I traveled to South Carolina to see a set of speeches that would become a historic inflection point — Oprah and Michelle Obama code-switching to tell the state’s Black Democrats that he was the real deal.

On Tuesday night, Michelle was back. She stood before an adoring crowd at the Democratic convention and drew concrete parallels between her Black American story and Kamala’s “person of color” immigrant story. Mothers were the linchpin of her cultural analogy. “Her mother is like mine, and like yours,” she said.

If you trust Michelle, you can trust Kamala. That was the gist.

Michelle went on to code-switch to the audience with a juggernaut of shots at Donald Trump’s privilege, his abuses of power and his inarticulateness. Then she owned the elephant in the room: naming Trump’s racist attacks on her, her husband and her children. She pulled no punches. “Who wants to tell him that the job he’s currently seeking might just be one of those Black jobs?” she said to thunderous applause.

Trump’s improbable run for president started as an ego campaign. Obama made him the butt of a joke at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner. Trump would continue to tell one of his big lies — that Obama is not American. 

Michelle Obama is the best messenger for this direct attack. After years of playing it safe, invoking the high ground, she went straight for the jugular.

“Most of us will never be afforded the grace of failing forward,” she said. “We will never benefit from the affirmative action of generational wealth.”

That is a brilliant rhetorical summation of complicated ideas that boil down to this: Donald Trump embodies the inequality that is an enemy of democracy.

No doublespeak, no metaphors — just the straight talk for which debased voters have been desperate. It was a theme for the night — righteous anger. Owning rage reflects the anger so many voters have been stuck with since 2016.