In a powerful 18-minute speech at the Democratic National Convention, Former US First Lady Michelle Obama tore into Donald Trump’s presidency, saying he is the “wrong president for our country” who is “clearly in over his head”.
“Let me be as honest and clear as I possibly can. Donald Trump is the wrong president for our country. He has had more than enough time to prove that he can do the job, but he is clearly in over his head. He cannot meet at this moment. He simply cannot be who we need him to be for us. It is what it is,” Michelle said in her address on the opening night of the 2020 Democratic National Convention.
Further, she slammed Trump for downplaying the threat from the Coronavirus which has killed more than 170,000 Americans and left the economy in “shambles”.
“More than 150,000 people have died, and our economy is in shambles because of a virus that this president downplayed for too long. It has left millions of people jobless. Too many have lost their health care; too many are struggling to take care of basic necessities like food and rent; too many communities have been left in the lurch to grapple with whether and how to open our schools safely,” she said.
Taking a dig at Trump, Obama said the job of the president is hard and it “requires clear-headed judgment, mastery of complex and competing issues, devotion to facts and history, a moral compass, and an ability to listen and an abiding belief that each of the 330,000,000 lives in this country has meaning and worth”.
“A president’s words have the power to move markets. They can start wars or broker peace. They can summon our better angels or awaken our worst instincts. You simply cannot fake your way through this job,” the 56-year-old former first lady said.
Obama cautioned that if Americans think things cannot possibly get worse, “trust me, they can; and they will if we don’t make a change in this election. If we have any hope of ending this chaos, we have got to vote for Joe Biden as our lives depend on it”.
Biden “will tell the truth, and trust science,” she said in a jab at Trump, who has been accused of repeatedly ignoring the advice of his scientific advisors on how to respond to the pandemic.
Obama said while Biden is not perfect and he’d be the first to tell Americans that. “But…his ability to learn and grow — we find in that the kind of humility and maturity that so many of us yearn for right now. Because Joe Biden has served this nation his entire life without ever losing sight of who he is; but more than that, he has never lost sight of who we are, all of us,” she said.
Obama lamented that in the presidential elections four years ago, too many people chose to believe that their votes didn’t matter or maybe because they were fed up.
“Whatever the reason, in the end, those choices sent someone to the Oval Office who lost the national popular vote by nearly 3,000,000 votes,” she said adding that “we’ve all been living with the consequences.”
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Former US vice president and presumptive Democratic presidential candidate Biden will challenge 74-year-old Republican incumbent President Trump in the November 3 election.
