The Democratic National Convention on Tuesday centered on a star-powered roll call naming Vice President Kamala Harris and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as their candidates.
Then, they turned up the heat on Donald Trump.
Michelle Obama brought down the house with a rousing speech that had numerous high points across its nearly 22 minutes.
But the former first lady got some of her biggest applause when she made a reference to one of Trump’s inflammatory comments at June’s debate, when the former president claimed migrants were taking millions of “Black jobs.”
“Who’s gonna tell him that the job he’s currently seeking might just be one of those Black jobs?” Obama said to cheers:
She was a tough act to follow, but her husband tried anyway as former President Barack Obama delivered a rousing speech of his own.
Obama slammed Trump for “whining” and warned that putting him back in office would lead to “four more years of bluster and bumbling and chaos.”
“We have seen that movie before,” Obama said. “And we all know that the sequel is usually worse.”
But the biggest response may have come when Obama took a shot at one of Trump’s pet topics: the size of his crowds, which has diminished lately as a growing number of bored supporters head for the exits while he’s still speaking.
“There’s the childish nicknames, the crazy conspiracy theories, this weird obsession with crowd sizes,” Obama said, using his hands for emphasis as the audience laughed. “It just goes on, and on, and on.”
Another zinger with a hand gesture came not at the DNC itself, but at a secondary event in Wisconsin featuring Harris and Walz that was held in the same arena that hosted the RNC last month.
Walz mocked Trump and the RNC for lacking the energy of the raucous Democratic Convention.
“Not only do we have massive energy at our convention, we got a helluva lot more energy at where they had their convention, right here,” Walz said.
The crowd roared, and Walz egged them on to get even louder.
“That one guy’s gonna be so sad tonight, so sad,” he said, then mimicked one of Trump’s hand gestures. “So sad, so sad.”
Another governor took aim at a different Trump obsession: his wealth.
Trump’s been accused of exaggerating his net worth, which could take a major hit since he was ordered to pay $464 million in fines after he lost his civil fraud case earlier this year.
He was separately ordered to pay $83.3 million in damages in late January for defaming writer E. Jean Carroll, which is also under appeal.
Speaking at the DNC on Tuesday, Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker ― a wealthy businessman himself ― suggested Trump’s bank accounts might not be as full as the former president has claimed.
“Donald Trump thinks that we should trust him on the economy because he claims to be very rich,” he said. “But take it from an actual billionaire. Trump is rich in only one thing: Stupidity.”
“The View” cohost and CNN commentator Ana Navarro ― a longtime Republican strategist who is part of the party’s “Never Trump” wing ― fired back at Trump for calling Harris a communist, saying she fled communism as a child.
“I don’t take it lightly,” she said, then described what communist dictators do:
“They attack the free press. They call them the enemy of the people, like Ortega does in Nicaragua. They put their unqualified relatives in cushy government jobs so they can get rich off their positions like the Castros do in Cuba and they refuse to accept legitimate elections when they lose and call for violence to stay in power like Maduro is doing right now in Venezuela. Now you tell me something: Do any of those things sound familiar? Is there anybody running for president who reminds you of that?”
She took a shot at Trump for his reported dislike of dogs as well as South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem (R), a close Trump ally who was reportedly under consideration for his vice presidential slot… until she bragged about shooting a dog she didn’t like.
“Kamala Harris, she likes dogs. And my dog ChaCha likes her. Dogs are good judges of character,” she said. “We cannot elect a president who does not like dogs or hangs around with people who shoot them.”