Michelle Obama has definitively condemned Donald Trump.

Jeremy Stahl: Hi again, Jim. It sounded like a story of two conventions to me. The first half was incredibly chintzy, inexpensive, and full of too many generics twirling, twirling, twirling towards freedom lines to remember. For the past 30 to 40 minutes or so, everyone who has ever worked or ridden on Amtrak has been a close personal friend of Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders warning that we are all going to die if Trump is re-elected, and Michelle Obama saying pretty much the same thing. Basically the latest elements including Steven Stills and Billy Porter restitution of camp fence / dadaist of “For What It’s Worth” – was actually pretty exciting when it came to these things, and almost everything that happened before was as distressing as these events become.

Let’s start with the good stuff. Sanders has argued that he deeply understands the stakes of losing again to Donald Trump, perhaps well enough to convince some of his supporters to close. His last line on Trump’s “authoritarianism” was devastating: “My friends, the price of failure is simply too high to be imagined.” He also argued that Biden’s platform was genuinely progressive, listing once-marginal progressive policies that are now mainstream Biden policies such as the $ 15 minimum wage, universal pre-k, and lowering of the Medicare eligibility age. This was, if I remember correctly, the only part of the night anyone actually spoke about what Biden could do as president. It was, for me, the most effective part of the evening and the highlight. What did you think, Jim? Did he lose you when he compared Trump’s golf to Nero’s violin while Rome was on fire?

Jim Newell: Jeremy! I’m used to golf chutes at this point.

I felt pretty much the same. Parts of the first hour were… difficult. Okay, I get it, Democrats first have to prove when they throw a convention that they don’t hate America, so they get a bunch of people from Zoom singing the national anthem. But I felt like I was watching an introductory video on a tour of the Smithsonian Museum of American History narrated by Eva Longoria. As the event progressed it settled into a well-paced beat, mixing well-made breathing videos – all the losing candidates were talking about losing to Biden, then the video from Amtrak, which was among the best of the vast “Did you know Joe Biden straddles a very large content library – with compelling speeches about the old hellish landscape that is Donald Trump’s America.

The lack of applause from the audience – let’s not count Zoom tapes of random Democrats sometimes supposed to clap – seemed to work best when the message was more serious. And Sanders went to just as much effort to scare viewers as he did to chop wood. “Under this administration, authoritarianism has taken root in our country,” he said. He made you realize how dark you were in a historic moment: “Me and my family, and many of you, know how authoritarianism destroys democracy, decency and humanity. As long as I’m here, I’ll be working with progressives, with moderates and, yes, with conservatives to save this nation from a threat that so many of our heroes fought and died to defeat. It was urgent. I missed that urgency in some of the other speeches. I guess there’s a need for speakers to talk about how Joe Biden is a nice person and all that, but Bernie being extremely serious about the timing of the story seemed to really take your breath away.

He wasn’t the last speaker to cut through the bullshit and lay out the issues so bluntly. is is that what it is, Jeremy?

Jeremiah: It is what it is. These are the words Donald Trump used to describe more than 150,000 deaths in the United States, more than any other country on the planet, from COVID-19. This is the line Michelle Obama was clearly referring to when she spoke about Trump’s inability to serve as president, especially now with a deadly virus still raging across the country. If Bernie’s speech was the perfect message to unite the left and moderate wing and warn how close this democracy is to the precipice right now, Michelle Obama’s was the ultimate condemnation of Trump and everything he’s done. “Let me be as honest and clear as possible,” she said. “Donald Trump is not the right president for our country. He’s had more than enough time to prove he can do the job, but he’s clearly over his head. He cannot meet this moment. He just can’t be the one we need for us. This is what it is. “It was a much more direct rebuke from Trump than what Obama gave in his widely acclaimed 2016 convention speech and I think it will hit people who might think. maybe all this was not this bad.

Indeed, she addressed this group directly: “If you think things can’t get worse. Believe me, they can; and they will if we don’t change this election. If we have any hope of ending this chaos, we must vote for Joe Biden as our lives depend on it. Donald Trump is literally killing us It was the most powerful and necessary message Democrats could deliver on Monday, and when they finally hit it, the man hit it. It should also be noted that the most effective part of the first half of the night was to Kristin urquiza, a woman whose Trump-supporting father died of COVID-19 after stay-at-home orders were lifted early in Arizona. She was someone who could literally say “Trump killed my father” and she did. “My father was a healthy 65-year-old man,” she says. “His only pre-existing condition was to trust Donald Trump and for that he paid with his life.” How did the “Trump is going to kill you and your loved ones” parts of the night work out for you?

Jim: Urquiza was the first moment of the night I thought Democrats could do not cancel the rest of the week’s schedule because things were going so badly. The personal story was so devastating but – trying to put it delicately – cathartic in a way. When I report to Capitol Hill, I so often hear Republicans answering questions about the President’s tweets with “I’m not responding to tweets” or “I haven’t seen the tweets” or “Trump is just trying to piss you off. , he doesn’t think so. Urquiza showed how those words, which are so often dismissed as “This Trump is really wacky”, can kill real people in the real world. As Michelle Obama would put it more candidly later, being president is difficult and having Trump as president – Donald Trump! as president! – means living in an inherently dangerous situation.

Speaking of misery, however, what went wrong for you, Jeremy?

Jeremiah: Trump’s press secretary Hogan Gidley’s description of the start of the night as “a Hollywood-produced infomercial” was not entirely in error. In a real way, the production at the start – from the raised transitional remarks by host Eva Longoria, to the vaporous reading of the night’s slogan “We the People”, to the downright painful music video by Bruce Springsteen on America “to stand up,” to the mundane remarks of the Never-Trump Republicans – made it very clear that it was not up to the task of the moment. They eventually got there, though, and I guess that’s all that matters.

Jim: The Never Trumpers went by pretty quickly, and what will be remembered most is the image of John Kasich standing at a crossroads while saying America was at a crossroads. I thought he had done a good job, however, in essentially recounting the heart-rending thoughts of a Republican or ex-Republican curious about Biden – although it created embarrassment when he promised Biden wouldn’t. . really listen to the left – and try to give them the last little push. Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s speech made me uncomfortable as it was about cleaning up his own COVID record, but his words about how Trump saw what happened in New York and did not move to stop the epidemics in the rest of the country were perfect. I liked Sara Gideon speaking from the rocks of Maine to present a performance of Maggie Rogers and then, oh shit, the camera is panning and Maggie Rogers is there on the rocks too!

Overall, I expected this afternoon to use this final recap to mostly poke fun at what we saw. Ten minutes later I really I thought that was what we would do. And yet they managed to convert it, in the end, into a relatively effective two-hour campaign ad.

Thanks, (Michelle) Obama.

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