Trump Is Having a Full-Blown Temper Tantrum Over Michelle Obama

Much ado was made, in 2016, about the supposed genius of the nicknames with which Donald Trump branded his opponents. Lyin’ Ted. Little Marco. Crooked Hillary. To some observers, these insults, however childish, stuck because they managed to capture something essential about their targets or the way that they were perceived. Through some combination of canny marketing or accidental savvy, the theory went, he was able to latch onto his opponents’ fatal flaw, like a bully seizing on his victim’s defining insecurity. But, like most of the skills attributed to Trump, this talent was grossly overstated: His digs have always been one-note, too broad, and his attempts at incisive monikers for Joe Biden in 2020 have failed to register. The magic isn’t gone—it was never there to begin with.

What does it really look like to expose a politician for who they are? It was Michelle Obama on Monday night, speaking at the virtual Democratic National Convention. Of course, she didn’t hurl puerile insults at the president—she didn’t need to. But she also didn’t need any rhetorical flourishes to lacerate him—no jokey jabs, no grand metaphors. All she needed was five simple words, words the president himself had used just this month to describe the rising COVID death toll : “It is what it is.”

For all his autocratic aspirations, Trump is no political wizard. He is, as Obama nailed him in her incisive, effortless takedown, a fraud, an incompetent in completely over his head, degrading the national discourse and flexing authoritarian muscles not because he’s an evil genius, but because he’s so thoroughly inadequate, so “unable to meet the moment,” that those strongman tactics are all he’s got. “He simply cannot be who we need him to be for us,” she said in her rousing address Monday. “It is what it is.”

The searing speech clearly struck a nerve with the president, who rattled off a series of desperate rebuttals against the former first lady and Barack Obama, one of the headliners for Wednesday’s DNC programming.

In one tweet, he asked that somebody “explain to [Obama] that Donald J. Trump would not be here, in the beautiful White House, if it weren’t for the job done by your husband, Barack Obama.” In another, he attempted to ding his predecessor and Joe Biden over their “weak and pathetic” response to the H1N1 flu, which left roughly 12,000 Americans dead, as opposed to the coronavirus pandemic that has killed over 170,000 Americans and counting. In another still, Trump made some familiar noises about supposed Obama administration corruption, deep state figures spying on his campaign, and treason, before somewhat incomprehensibly thanking Michelle Obama for her “very kind words.” In an appearance at the White House later Tuesday morning, he lashed out again, saying she was “in over her head” and criticizing her for pre-recording the speech, noting that she had “the wrong [coronavirus] deaths”—calling attention to the fact that the death count is now far higher than it was when she taped her address.