Michelle Obama’s DNC speech: Trump’s reaction and other things to know

Former first lady Michelle Obama’s speech at the first night of the 2020 Democratic National Convention sent viewers on a Google search for her “vote” necklace — and President Donald Trump to react on Twitter.

The virtual four-night event featured Obama, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, and Ohio Gov. John Kasich, a Republican, among its speakers on the first night.

Kasich told his fellow anti-Trump Republicans to vote for presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden while former presidential candidate Sanders urged his supporters to continue his progressive movement by voting for Biden.

Here are five things to know about Obama’s speech.

Obama made a moral case against Trump

The former first lady told viewers to vote for Biden “like our lives depend on it,” in a pre-taped speech.

“So let me be as honest and clear as I possibly can. Donald Trump is the wrong president for our country,” she said. “He has had more than enough time to prove that he can do the job, but he is clearly in over his head. He cannot meet this moment. He simply cannot be who we need him to be for us. It is what it is.”

“If you take one thing from my words tonight, it is this: if you think things cannot possibly get worse, trust me, they can; and they will if we don’t make a change in this election. If we have any hope of ending this chaos, we have got to vote for Joe Biden like our lives depend on it.”

Obama encouraged people to turn out to vote, referencing how Trump lost the popular vote in the 2016 general election.

“As I’ve said before, being president doesn’t change who you are; it reveals who you are. Well, a presidential election can reveal who we are, too,” she said. “And four years ago, too many people chose to believe that their votes didn’t matter. Maybe they were fed up. Maybe they thought the outcome wouldn’t be close. Maybe the barriers felt too steep. Whatever the reason, in the end, those choices sent someone to the Oval Office who lost the national popular vote by nearly 3,000,000 votes.”

Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by nearly 2.9 million votes but lost the electoral college to Trump, CNN reported. Clinton won 48.2% of the votes compared to Trump’s 46.1%.

Her “vote” necklace went viral

Obama’s gold necklace spelling out “V-O-T-E” went viral after her speech, with some people urging Biden’s campaign to sell them.

“I had created a VOTE necklace for the last election and knew I was going to do it again,” designer Chari Cuthbert said in a statement to USA TODAY. “As we started our outreach, I was honored when Michelle Obama’s stylist asked for one and am thrilled she is wearing it.”

“’Michelle Obama necklace,’ ‘vote necklace’ and ‘letter necklace’ are breakout searches, past hour, US - The necklace is the top trending search on all of US Google in the last hour of the event,” USA Today reported, citing Google Trends.

The company is selling the necklace in white, yellow and rose gold for $295 for small letters and $405 for large letters.

She invoked Black Lives Matter movement and the pandemic

Obama mentioned the Black Lives Matter protests and the coronavirus pandemic as reasons to vote Trump out of office.

“More than 150,000 people have died, and our economy is in shambles because of a virus that this president downplayed for too long,” she said. “It has left millions of people jobless. Too many have lost their health care; too many are struggling to take care of basic necessities like food and rent; too many communities have been left in the lurch to grapple with whether and how to open our schools safely. Internationally, we’ve turned our back, not just on agreements forged by my husband, but on alliances championed by presidents like Reagan and Eisenhower.”

“And here at home, as George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and a never-ending list of innocent people of color continue to be murdered, stating the simple fact that a Black life matters is still met with derision from the nation’s highest office,” she continued.

More than 170,000 people have died in the U.S. of COVID-19 as of August 18, according to Johns Hopkins University.

Nearly 1.2 million Americans filed for initial unemployment benefits in the week ending on Aug. 1, the 20th consecutive week with more than a million applications, according to the U.S. Labor Department.

Floyd, 46, died while in police custody on May 25 and his death sparked an avalanche of protests across the nation. He died after now-fired Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin pressed his knee into Floyd’s neck for about eight minutes, as three other officers didn’t intervene.

In May, Trump called the protesters in Minneapolis “thugs” and said that “when the looting starts, the shooting starts,” CBS reported. His tweet was flagged for “glorifying violence.”

Trump said, “I feel very, very badly” about Floyd’s death. “That’s a very shocking sight.”

She highlighted President Obama’s record

“When my husband left office with Joe Biden at his side, we had a record-breaking stretch of job creation,” she said. “We’d secured the right to health care for 20,000,000 people. We were respected around the world, rallying our allies to confront climate change. And our leaders had worked hand-in-hand with scientists to help prevent an Ebola outbreak from becoming a global pandemic.”

President Obama deployed medical personnel and troops to West Africa to build treatment centers in 2014, WGBH reported. Bina Venkataraman, chief policy advisor to the president’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, told the outlet that Obama’s response to Ebola has differed from Trump’s response to COVID-19.

“It’s hard to overstate the contrast. For one, you had a president who actually accepted and cultivated scientific advice,” Venkataraman said. “So, the fact that I was a policy advisor to a whole council of external scientists, technologists advising the president tells you something about how President Obama even structured getting advice from outsiders, being willing to accept the state of affairs.”

Opinions on Trump’s coronavirus response have been mostly divided by party.

Seventy-three percent of Republicans said Trump is doing an “excellent or good job,” according to a Pew Research Center survey released on Aug. 6. Eighty-two percent of Democrats said Trump was doing a “poor job” and only 6% said he was doing an “excellent or good job.”

The survey was conducted from July 27 to Aug. 2 with a sample of 11,001 people. The margin of error is 1.5 percentage points.

Trump slammed her speech on Twitter

Trump responded to Obama’s remarks, saying he wouldn’t be president had it not been for former President Obama.

“Somebody please explain to @MichelleObama 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,” Trump wrote on Twitter on Tuesday.

“Biden was merely an afterthought, a good reason for that very late & unenthusiastic endorsement,” he continued.

Trump also slammed former President Obama and Biden’s response to the swine flu.

“Looking back into history, the response by the ObamaBiden team to the H1N1 Swine Flu was considered a weak and pathetic one. Check out the polling, it’s really bad. The big difference is that they got a free pass from the Corrupt Fake News Media!” Trump tweeted.

Sixty-seven percent of Americans were “very” or “somewhat confident” the government could handle the H1N1 or swine flu about four months into the 2009 pandemic, according to an Aug. 2009 Gallup poll.