The last time Barack Obama publicly mocked Donald Trump, it had somewhat unexpected consequences. As president, Obama took aim at the then-real estate mogul and reality TV star in 2011 at the annual Washington Press Association dinner. Obama had released his birth certificate three days earlier to debunk a conspiracy theory Trump had spread that he was not born in the United States. “Donald can finally focus on more important matters, like did the moon landing happen?” Obama quipped, to the amusement of the audience, where Trump was also seated at the table.

Trump himself She denied it years later. However, according to several people in his entourage, he decided that evening to run for president himself. The businessman had been flirting with a move into politics since the 1980s and his public humiliation over it. White House Correspondents’ Dinner He would give him the final push. And in 2016, the time had come: Trump was elected to succeed the president he had despised five years earlier.

Despite that history, Barack Obama and his wife, Michelle, used their speaking time at the Democratic convention Tuesday night in part to mock Trump once again. They gave the bully Trump more than a taste of his own medicine. Harassing Republicans is a tactic Democrats have tried before. It reads like this: Provoking a former president, with his notoriously sensitive temper, into personal counterattacks to the point where he can’t address voters’ real concerns.

Letting Trump go astray

In recent weeks, Trump has repeatedly deviated from his prepared speech to air all manner of grievances old and new — from Hillary Clinton’s emails to Joe Biden’s late replacement by Kamala Harris — much to the chagrin of his campaign team and other Republicans, who are urging him to talk more about the economy, immigration or crime.

If the Obamas’ intention was to “troll Trump,” they didn’t hold back Tuesday night. Far more than his many compliments about Kamala Harris, Barack Obama grabbed attention with an apparent joke about the supposedly limited gender of his successor.

“Trump is a 78-year-old billionaire who has been complaining about his problems since he came down the golden ladder nine years ago. There has been a steady stream of complaints and grievances, which are getting worse now that he is terrified of losing to Kamala. There are the childish nicknames, the crazy conspiracy theories, and his crazy obsession with crowd size,” he said.

With that last comment, Obama reached up to look at his hands with a bemused smile, prompting suggestions that Trump’s “obsession” with size isn’t limited to crowds.

Black jobs

Obama also drew laughs when he quoted someone who likened Trump to “the neighbor who spends all day under your window blowing his leaf blower.” Well, that’s tiring coming from a neighbor. For a president, it’s just dangerous.” According to Obama: “We can’t afford four more years of bluster and intimidation and chaos. We’ve seen that movie, and we all know that the sequels are usually worse.

In an apparent reference to the conspiracy theory that questioned her husband’s citizenship, Michelle Obama said: “Donald Trump has done everything he can to make people afraid of us. Because his narrow, narrow view of the world made him feel threatened by the presence of two successful, hard-working, highly educated people who also happened to be black.

It was a starting point for an earlier joke. first lady I was trained to draw attention to a recent controversial statement by Trump. In a raucous debate before a black audience in late July in Chicago, he warned that immigrants were “taking black jobs,” which seemed to imply that African Americans were essentially serving at the bottom of the labor market. So Michelle Obama asked the audience, “Who’s going to tell him that the job he’s seeking right now might just be one of those ‘black jobs’?”

Trump had yet to respond to the pinpricks as of Wednesday morning. His campaign I noticed after the first day of the conference Trump’s name was mentioned 147 times. That means Democrats in particular are not taking voters’ concerns seriously: “That’s 130 times more than crime, inflation, and the border combined.”

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