Michelle Obama laced into Donald Trump in a searing speech in Michigan on Saturday, accusing the former president of “gross incompetence” and having an “amoral character” while challenging hesitant Americans to choose Kamala Harris for US president.
“By every measure, she has demonstrated that she’s ready,” the former first lady told a rapt audience in Kalamazoo. “The real question is, as a country, are we ready for this moment?”
With the race virtually deadlocked, Obama, a reluctant political campaigner, said she was in the midwestern battleground heeding her own advice to “do something” to support Harris bid to be the country’s first female president.
In raw and strikingly personal terms, she asked why Harris was being held to a “higher standard” than her opponent. Trump’s handling of the Covid-19 pandemic and his failed attempt to cling to power after losing the 2020 election should alone be disqualifying, Obama argued. But now the people who worked closest with him when he was president – his former advisers and cabinet secretaries – had stepped forward with a warning that he should not be allowed to return to power.
“I hope you’ll forgive me if I’m a little frustrated that some of us are choosing to ignore Donald Trump’s gross incompetence while asking Kamala to dazzle us at every turn,” Obama said. “Preach!” a woman shouted.
The event in Kalamazoo, which Obama referred to as “Kamala-zoo”, was her first appearance on the campaign trail this election, after delivering a rousing speech at the Democratic national convention in August. To predominantly female audience, Obama said voters shouldn’t choose Harris because she’s a woman but “because Kamala Harris is a grown-up – and Lord knows we need a grown-up in the White House”.
When Obama finished, Beyoncé’s Freedom thundered from the loudspeakers and Harris emerged on stage. The women – the first Black first lady and the first Black vice-president – embraced, and the crowd erupted.
With 10 days left, Harris delivered her closing argument: she pledged to be a president who listened to the American people, unlike her opponent, whom she accused of “looking in the mirror all the time”.
“Just imagine the Oval Office in three months,” she said. “It is either Donald Trump in there stewing over his enemies’ list – or me working for you, checking off my to-do list.”
Before the event, Harris visited a local doctor’s office in nearby Portage, where she spoke to healthcare providers and medical students about the impact of abortion restrictions. Harris has made protecting “reproductive freedom” and what remains of abortion access a major theme of her campaign, using it to draw a sharp contrast with Trump, who has claimed credit for his role in overturning Roe v Wade but insisted he would not allow a nationwide ban as president.
In Kalamazoo, both Harris and Obama argued that Trump had no credibility on the matter. But Obama went further, describing the full spectrum of women’s reproductive health – from period cramps to hot flashes – and demanding that they are seen as “more than just baby-making vessels”. She lamented the lack of research on women’s health and the racial disparities in treatment. Directing her comments to the “men who love us”, Obama asked them to consider the harm that is done when a government “keeps revoking the basic care from its women”.
Earlier this month, Barack Obama delivered a stern message for Black men in his first campaign event for Harris, telling them to drop the “excuses” and support her. Michelle Obama tried a different tack – asking American men to listen to women this election.
“I am asking y’all, from the core of my being, to take our lives seriously,” Obama said, her voice swelling with emotion. “If we don’t get this election right, your wife, your daughter, your mother, we as women will become collateral damage to your rage.”
Abortion bans, she argued, affected men as well. If something happened during a pregnancy or a delivery and the doctor was prevented from providing care, “you will be the one praying that it’s not too late. You will be the one pleading for somebody, anybody, to do something, and then there is the tragic but very real possibility that in the worst-case scenario, you just might be the one holding flowers at the funeral,” she said.
The Obamas’ appeals reflected the election-defining gender divide between the candidates, with women powering Harris and men turning to Trump. She acknowledged the challenges facing the country, and conceded that progress could be too slow, but she argued that sitting out or voting third-party was not the answer.
“There is too much we stand to lose if we get this one wrong,” she said.
While Barack Obama is known as his party’s great orator, Michelle Obama remains one of its most popular and effective speakers. Having once encouraged Democrats to “go high” when they “go low”, Obama on Saturday made no effort to conceal her disdain for the man who led a years-long campaign questioning her husband’s birthplace. Trump has also turned the racist birtherism conspiracy on Harris, the daughter of immigrants who was born in Oakland, California.
“In any other profession or arena, Trump’s criminal track record and amoral character would be embarrassing, shameful and disqualifying,” she said.
The Harris campaign deployed Obama – along with Barack Obama and other leading figures and celebrities, including Beyoncé and Bruce Springsteen – in hopes that their star power might deliver an 11th-hour jolt to a presidential contest that has otherwise remained static.
Both Harris and Trump were in Michigan on Saturday, chasing the state’s 15 electoral votes.
After Pennsylvania, where Harris will campaign on Sunday, Michigan is perhaps the next most critical state on the Democrat’s path to the White House.
Trump – who planned to spend part of Sunday at a rally in New York City’s Madison Square Garden – won Pennsylvania in 2016, when he tore down the trio of “blue wall” battlegrounds. But four years later, Michigan delivered Biden his biggest swing state victory and then Democrats swept the state in the 2022 congressional midterms, after the supreme court ruling overturning Roe v Wade.
Polls show a dead heat. Trump has sought to exacerbate Democratic divisions over the Biden administration’s handling of Israel’s war in Gaza and Lebanon, elevating the issue in Michigan, where scores of Muslim and Arab American voters have said they cannot support Harris. On Saturday, Trump was joined on stage in Novi, Michigan, by Bill Bazzi, the current and first Muslim mayor of Dearborn Heights.
“I have never seen the devastation that we’re seeing right now,” Bazzi said. “When President Trump was president, there was no wars.”
The Harris campaign has conducted several outreach attempts to the Arab community, but tensions remain high with little time for a course change and the risk of escalation following Israel’s pre-dawn strikes on Iran. At the event, Harris was interrupted by a pro-Palestinian protester. “We have to end that war,” she responded, as the crowd drowned out the demonstration with “Kamala” chants.
Democrats are focused on juicing turnout in Detroit – which Trump insulted (again) at his Novi event on Saturday – while aggressively courting women, independents and anti-Trump Republicans in the suburbs. Her campaign recently earned the support of Fred Upton, the state’s long-serving Republican representative who left office in 2022. Upton told the Detroit Free Press that he had never supported a Democrat for president but this year cast an absentee ballot for Harris: “He’s just totally unhinged. We don’t need this chaos.”
Speaking before Harris, Michigan senator Gary Peters compared the presidential campaign to the highest-stakes job interview. Extending the metaphor, he suggested that they check Trump’s references. The senator quoted Trump’s longest-serving chief of staff John Kelly, who recently said on the record that his former boss fit the definition of a fascist.
“Would you hire that guy?” Peters asked. “No!” the crowd thundered back.
