Michelle Obama has received lots of praise for her speech at a Hillary Clinton campaign rally in Manchester, New Hampshire, on Thursday.* Her brutal criticism of Donald Trump has gone viral and many are characterizing it as a potential key moment in the presidential contest. And it isn’t just Democrats who think so. Conservative talk show host Glenn Beck, who has long been a Trump critic, called it “the most effective political speech since Ronald Reagan” on his show on Friday.
“The audience was pin-drop quiet. It connected. Whether you like to believe it or not, whether I want to believe it or not, it connected. And it was powerful,” Beck said. The conservative talk show host called on his listeners to watch the speech to see for themselves the “devastating effects” it can have. “And I don’t mean on Donald Trump,” he added. “I mean on the conservative movement.” Why? Because it is an effective message to get women away from Republicans in general. “We had been talking about, ‘there is no war on women.’ You just handed them a war on women,” Beck said. “And if you listen to her words carefully, oh my gosh, oh my gosh, they are coopting women and it will work.”
On Thursday, Michelle Obama appeared to hold back tears as she spoke passionately about how the 2005 videotape in which Trump boasted about sexual assault affected her more than she expected. “I can’t stop thinking about this,” she said. “It has shaken me to my core in a way that I couldn’t have predicted.” The first lady said that it didn’t matter what party you belonged to: “No woman deserves to be treated this way.”
On CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday, Democratic strategist Paul Begala said Michelle Obama’s speech will go down in history. “Michelle Obama’s speech will be one of the things people study 100 years from now,” Begala said. “It was that powerful.”
*Correction, Oct. 17, 2016: This post originally misspelled New Hampshire.
