Former first lady Michelle Obama issued a blistering assessment of the Donald Trump years during a rousing speech for the second night of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago on Tuesday, delivering a revamped version of her famed catchphrase for the modern political era.
Obama first delivered the now-iconic line — “When they go low, we go high” — in 2016 as she stumped for then-Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton’s bid for the White House. On Tuesday, she painted a vision for America under a different woman president as she and her husband, former President Barack Obama, took the stage to support Vice President Kamala Harris and her own run for office.
“This election is going to be close … So we need to vote in numbers to erase any doubt,” Obama said. “We have the power to pay forward the love, sweat and sacrifice of our mothers and fathers and all those who came before us. We did it before y’all, and we sure can do it again.”
“Let us work like our lives depend on it, and let us keep moving our country forward and go higher, yes, always higher than we’ve ever gone before.”
Watch the moment below beginning at 19:15.
Obama began by championing the Democratic Party’s fierce support for Harris over the past month, saying she, like many, felt “the contagious power of hope” once more.
“Something wonderfully magical is in the air, isn’t it?” the former first lady said. “You know, we’re feeling it here in this arena, but it’s spreading across this country we love. A familiar feeling that has been buried too deep for far too long.”
She briefly mentioned Trump by name, but excoriated his effort to stoke fears throughout the nation. Harris, she said, understood that most Americans would “never be afforded the grace of failing forward” or benefit from the “affirmative action of generational wealth.”
“His limited, narrow view of the world made him feel threatened by the existence of two hard-working, highly educated, successful people who happen to be Black,” Obama said of the former president. “I want to know, who’s going to tell him, that the job he is currently seeking might just be one of those Black jobs?”