“Let me be as honest and clear as I possibly can. Donald Trump is the wrong president for our country,” Obama said, wearing a gold necklace with the word “vote” spelled out. “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 at this moment. He simply cannot be who we need him to be for us. It is what it is.”

Obama’s speech, capping off the first night of the virtual Democratic National Convention, was a remarkable rebuke from a former first lady of a sitting US president.

“Sadly, this is the America that is on display for the next generation,” Obama said. “A nation that’s underperforming not simply on matters of policy but on matters of character. And that’s not just disappointing; it’s downright infuriating because I know the goodness and the grace that is out there in households and neighborhoods all across this nation.”

“And I know that regardless of our race, age, religion, or politics, when we close out the noise and the fear and truly open our hearts, we know that what’s going on in this country is just not right. This is not who we want to be,” she continued.

The former first lady also referenced her 2016 Democratic National Convention speech four years ago, in which she coined her famous catchphrase in response to Trump: “When they go low, we go high.”

“Over the past four years, a lot of people have asked me, ‘When others are going so low, does going high still really work?’ My answer: going high is the only thing that works, because when we go low, when we use those same tactics of degrading and dehumanizing others, we just become part of the ugly noise that’s drowning out everything else. We degrade ourselves. We degrade the very causes for which we fight,” she said, The Hill reported.

Obama acknowledged that her address would not be welcome by all sections of US society, alluding to the role racism still plays in the country.

“I understand that my message won’t be heard by some people. We live in a nation that is deeply divided, and I am a Black woman speaking at the Democratic Convention,” Obama said.” But enough of you know me by now. You know that I tell you exactly what I’m feeling. You know I hate politics. But you also know that I care about this nation. You know how much I care about all of our children.”

Obama was the most high-profile speaker who addressed the first night of the convention, which also saw a number of other prominent politicians. The convention sought to promote its theme of unity by hosting speakers ranging from progressive Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and former Republican Gov. John Kasich (Ohio).

The former first lady wrapped the speech with a plea for those watching to vote, invoking the words of the late civil rights icon Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga).

“It is up to us to add our voices and our votes to the course of history, echoing heroes like John Lewis who said, ‘When you see something that is not right, you must say something. You must do something,'” Obama said quoting Lewis. “That is the truest form of empathy: not just feeling, but doing; not just for ourselves or our kids, but for everyone, for all our kids.”

“As far as TikTok is concerned, we’re banning them from the United States,” Trump told reporters on Friday on Air Force One, adding he will “sign the document tomorrow.”

ByteDance did not immediately respond to CGTN’s request for comment. TikTok belongs to the Chinese group ByteDance and has nearly one billion users worldwide.

As TikTok’s second-largest user base, the US has seen an increase of 45 million new users in 2020 alone amid the COVID-19 pandemic. The app has been downloaded more than 165 million times on app stores, according to Sensor Tower data.

Just a few hours ago, reports said Microsoft was planning to acquire TikTok’s US operations.

Earlier, in response to Trump’s comments over a potential ban of TikTok, Chinese Foreign Ministry said certain politicians in the US should give up their prejudice against Chinese companies. China also slammed the United States as “the world’s real hacker empire.”

The White House announced that US President Donald Trump had approved a move to diverge partly from the 1987 Missile Technology Control Regime, in which 35 countries agreed to restrict the exports of armed drones delivery systems.

The MTCR was aimed at controlling the spread of missiles that could deliver large payloads like nuclear weapons.

But it also covered armed drones, at the time, not a major component of armed conflict as they are now.

The change ordered by Trump will reclassify armed drones from a technology whose export is severely restricted to a category that can be considered on a case-by-case basis.

The drones in the category must have a maximum airspeed of fewer than 800 kilometers per hour, which will allow sales of the Reaper and Predator drones used by the US military, as well as others made by US defense manufacturers.

“The MTCR’s standards are more than three decades old,” the White House said in a statement, AFP reported.

“Not only do these outdated standards give an unfair advantage to countries outside of the MTCR and hurt United States industry, but they also hinder our deterrence capability abroad by handicapping our partners and allies with subpar technology.”

The White House statement said two years of talks had failed to reform the MTCR.

The move has worried arms control advocates who say the US sale of advanced drones to more countries could fuel the global arms race.

“The Trump administration has once again weakened international export controls on the export of lethal drones,” said Senator Bob Menendez in a statement.

“This reckless decision makes it more likely that we will export some of our most deadly weaponry to human rights abuses across the world,” he said.

“Well, I think with the president’s comments today, he recognized the mistakes he has made by now embracing mask-wearing and the recognition this is not a hoax. It is a pandemic that has gotten worse before it will get better because of his inaction,” Pelosi said on CNN’s “The Situation Room.”

“In fact, clearly, it is the Trump virus,” Pelosi added, reiterating the phrase later in the interview as well.

The Democratic leader was responding to the president’s briefing at the White House earlier Tuesday in which he praised the use of face masks and urged Americans to wash their hands and practice physical distancing to stem the spread of the disease.

During the briefing — the president’s first coronavirus-focused White House briefing in nearly three months — Trump also warned that the outbreak in the US will “get worse before it gets better” amid surges in parts of the country.

“If he had said months ago, let’s wear masks, let’s not — let’s socially distance instead of having rallies and whatever they were, then more people would have followed his lead,” Pelosi argued on CNN. “He’s the president of the United States.”

Pressed by CNN host Wolf Blitzer on whether she was asserting that thousands of Americans had died because of the president’s response, Pelosi responded, “Yes, that’s what I am saying. I think it’s clearly evident.”

The comments mark one of the strongest rebukes yet of Trump’s handling of the pandemic, which Democrats maintain could have been more aggressively dealt with by the White House.

The criticism, which centers around Trump’s early reluctance to wear a mask and barbs from some White House aides directed at health officials such as Anthony Fauci, has been amplified amid a spike in coronavirus cases across the country, particularly in the South and West.

“We’re approaching 4 million. We’re approaching 4 million people infected, people affected by this, infected by it, and a large number, like 140,000, who have passed away. If it’s important to wear a mask now. It would have been important to wear it in March instead of telling us that by April we would all be going to church together. I wish that were the case, but he had no scientific basis for that,” Pelosi said, The Hill reported.

“If they don’t return to science and governance — and that’s a way that we can overcome this. We have hope and prayers for a vaccine. God willing that will be soon. But it is still months away, and people will die. So let’s hope that the president comes closer to embracing the reality of this pandemic, this Trump virus.”

In apparent recognition of the burgeoning health crisis, Trump has expressed more openness to masks, posting a picture on Twitter of him wearing one and urging Americans to more strictly adhere to health guidance from federal officials.

“It will probably, unfortunately, get worse before it gets better,” Trump said Tuesday.

“We’re asking everybody that when you are not able to socially distance, wear a mask,” he added. “Whether you like the mask or not, they have an impact. They’ll have an effect, and we need everything we can get.”

Asked in an interview with ABC News’s George Stephanopoulos, set to air Wednesday, what she would tell the president if she was in front of him in the Oval Office, Mary Trump responded, “Resign.”

Mary Trump, a clinical psychologist, said that her uncle has been “perverted” by deep issues in their family, making him “utterly incapable of leading this country, and it’s dangerous to allow him to do so.”

“I saw firsthand what focusing on the wrong things, elevating the wrong people can do — the collateral damage that can be created by allowing somebody to live their lives without accountability,” she said. “And it is striking to see that continuing now on a much grander scale.”

Mary Trump said that Fred Trump, her grandfather and President Trump’s father, was a “sociopath” whose years of poor treatment contributed to the president’s temperament. When her grandfather died, she and her siblings entered years-long litigation with the rest of the Trump family over their portion of his will, The Hill reported.

“He was incredibly driven in a way that turned other people, including his children (and) wife, into pawns to be used to his own ends,” she said. “It’s impossible to know who Donald might have been under different circumstances and with different parents. But clearly he learned the lesson.”

“Too Much And Never Enough” offers a damning portrait of Donald Trump, painting him as cruel, incompetent and narcissistic.

“If he is afforded a second term, it would be the end of American democracy,” Mary Trump writes.

The Trump family had fought to block the book’s publication, saying Mary Trump was violating a nondisclosure agreement she had signed, but the courts sided with her, and the memoir’s release was ultimately bumped up by two weeks.

On Wednesday night, the justice department sought an emergency order from a judge to block the publication of Bolton’s book, after explosive excerpts were printed by various news organizations.

This latest move comes after the administration filed a civil suit against Bolton on Tuesday. The emergency temporary restraining order filed Wednesday, which seeks to stop the release of his book on June 23, is unlikely to succeed, legal experts said, especially since copies had already been distributed to booksellers and journalists.

In a statement, Bolton’s publisher Simon and Schuster called the restraining order “a frivolous, politically motivated exercise in futility. Hundreds of thousands of copies of John Bolton’s ‘The Room Where It Happened’ have already been distributed around the country and the world. The injunction as requested by the government would accomplish nothing.’’

Bolton’s book accuses the US president of being driven by political calculations when making national security decisions.

According to Bolton, who was a national security adviser for a 17-month period, Trump pleaded with China’s president, Xi Jinping, during a 2019 summit to help his re-election prospects, which mirrored the president’s efforts to solicit political help from Ukraine.

In one instance, according to Bolton, the two world leaders were discussing hostility to China in the US when “Trump then, stunningly, turned the conversation to the coming US presidential election, alluding to China’s economic capability and pleading with Xi to ensure he’d win.”

“He stressed the importance of farmers and increased Chinese purchases of soybeans and wheat in the electoral outcome. I would print Trump’s exact words, but the government’s prepublication review process has decided otherwise.”

Bolton wrote that he believes that Congress should have expanded the scope of its impeachment inquiry to these other incidents.

Trump has derided Bolton, claiming that he is breaking the law by moving forward with plans to publish a book that contains classified information.

In its legal actions, the administration’s primary argument is that Bolton breached his non-disclosure agreement and failed to see through a process to make sure his book was properly sanitized of sensitive information, according to Bradley Moss, a lawyer who specializes in matters relating to national security.

The justice department’s latest effort to block publication is a “clever but doomed effort to circumvent existing judicial case law restricting its authority to censor the media”, Moss told the Guardian. “They are only seeking the injunction against Bolton but are then using an obscure rule of civil procedure to argue that the court can also enjoin the publisher and all commercial resellers of the books.”

In reality, little can be done to stop the book from getting out at this stage, Moss noted: “The media has copies already. The book is coming out.”

Federal prosecutors were reported on Wednesday to be mulling criminal charges against Bolton.