Former First Lady Michelle Obama offered a stunning speech to close the first night of the Democratic National Convention, galvanizing viewers with calls to empathy and denouncing Donald Trump’s abject failure of leadership. “He cannot meet this moment. He simply cannot be who we need him to be for us. It is what it is,” she said, a reference to Trump’s own response to the rising U.S. death toll in his shocking Axios interview. “He 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.”
Being president, she said, “doesn’t change who you are. It reveals who you are.” Staring soberly into the camera in a notable example of a highly successful pre-taped speech—one that only felt more intimate and effective for its format—she noted that children in Trump’s America are “seeing what happens when we stop requiring empathy of one another. They’re looking around wondering if we’ve been lying to them this whole time about who we are and what we truly value.”
The virtual nature of the convention played to the masses, sometimes bizarrely—John Kasich literally stood at a crossroads to discuss America’s path forward—until roughly the second half of the event, when the broadcast transitioned from stilted to deeply moving. Programming kicked off with a focus on “regular people”—a small business owner, a school nurse—speaking to the central issues plaguing average Americans during the pandemic and economic crisis. Later, a clip featured Amtrak workers speaking about Biden, a “regular” who “bought rounds of coffee for fellow passengers and crew.” A voiceover added: “The average guy is important to him.”
Trump’s divisiveness was a central focus and offered speakers a vehicle to describe his shortcomings, such as his opposition to mail-in voting, his bungling of the coronavirus pandemic, and his inadequate response to the watershed reckoning on race prompted by the police killing of George Floyd. “Donald Trump didn’t create the division. The division created Trump,” Governor Andrew Cuomo said. A woman named Kristin Urquiza, whose father, a Trump voter, died of COVID-19 in Arizona, gave a somber, gut-wrenching speech, noting that her father’s “only pre-existing condition was trusting Donald Trump—and for that he paid with his life.”
The second-most-anticipated speaker of the night, Senator Bernie Sanders, came onscreen with almost no fanfare. Sanders warned of “a president who is leading us down the path of authoritarianism” and rattled off a list of policy initiatives supported by the Biden camp—a welcome talking point for those who complained the presentation had been light on policy positions. He spoke to minimum wage, infrastructure, and climate change among other issues. He noted to his base that “our movement continues,” that “many of the ideas we fought for, but just a few years ago were considered radical are now mainstream,” and that under Trump, all that progress could be lost. “My dear friends,” he concluded, “the price of failure is just too great to imagine.”