First lady Michelle Obama speaks during a campaign rally for Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton on Oct. 13, 2016, in Manchester, N.H. (Jim Cole/AP)

In a presidential campaign being waged primarily over questions of personal integrity, the current occupants of the White House are staking out the moral high ground against Donald Trump, whom they are casting as morally unfit to be president.

President Obama and the first lady are making the case with increasing vigor on the campaign trail that the Republican nominee’s personal conduct has disqualified him from holding the nation’s highest office.

On Thursday, Michelle Obama, who has generally refrained from political combat, delivered her most forceful and emotional rebuke of Trump, calling his treatment of women “disgraceful” and declaring that “no woman deserves to be treated this way.”

“Let’s be clear: This is not normal. . . . This is intolerable,” she said during a campaign rally for Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton in Manchester, N.H., directly addressing news reports that Trump had groped and kissed several women against their will.

“I can’t stop thinking about this,” the first lady said, her voice cracking at times. “It has shaken me to my core in a way that I couldn’t have predicted.”

At an Oct. 13 Hillary Clinton campaign event, first lady Michelle Obama grew emotional while talking about allegations of sexual assault against Republican nominee Donald Trump. (Youtube/Hillary Clinton)

The Obamas had been campaigning against Trump before the disclosure last week of a videotape in which he made lewd comments about women in 2005 and the allegations against him of sexual assault. But the new revelations have raised the stakes of their personal plea to the public to reject the New York real estate developer.

“You don’t have to be a husband or father to say, ‘That’s not right.’ You just have to be a decent human being,” President Obama said of Trump’s lewd comments, during a Clinton campaign rally in Greensboro, N.C., on Tuesday.

While the president seemed to revel in his takedown of Trump, mocking him as unfit for a job at 7-Eleven, it is the first lady’s increased political role in the campaign that has added an emotional punch to the Obamas’ argument.

Michelle Obama’s speech, televised live on cable news networks, marked her second appearance on a national stage in which she assumed the role of mom-in-chief to speak to the nation’s moral conscience.

Her address at the Democratic National Convention in July — during which she said the first family’s motto is “when they go low, we go high” — was widely viewed as an emotional rallying point for the Democratic Party.

In New Hampshire, Obama, the mother of two teenage girls, warned that the country “cannot endure this or expose our children to it any longer — not for another minute, let alone another four years.”

The first lady retains broad popularity, with her national approval ratings reaching 64 percent after her convention address, according to Gallup, and in many ways she is Clinton’s most effective public surrogate on matters of personal conduct and moral authority.

The first lady has been cashing in on her popularity as she tours the country in support of Hillary Clinton and an election she seems to be taking very personally. Her skewering criticism of Donald Trump is all the more potent for her refusal to ever utter his name. (Erin Patrick O'Connor/The Washington Post)

A former corporate lawyer who met her husband when she was assigned to mentor him, Michelle Obama has spent her adult lifetime balancing the demands of work and family life. In her remarks Thursday, she reflected on the stories from previous generations of the male boss who could “say and do whatever he pleased to the women in the office.”

Trump has been accused of walking in on naked contestants in his beauty pageants, and a reporter for People magazine wrote this week that he sexually assaulted her while she was interviewing him for an article shortly after he married his current wife, Melania.

“So many have worked for so many years to end this kind of violence and abuse and disrespect,” the first lady said. “But here we are, in 2016, and we’re hearing these exact same things every day on the campaign trail. We are drowning in it.”

The latest Trump controversies have come at a time when both Obamas have been emphasizing their work as role models to young boys and girls.

The president participated in a town-hall-style event Tuesday with ESPN to talk about the My Brother’s Keeper initiative his administration began in 2014 to provide support for at-risk young African American men. And the first lady has spent the past 18 months building Let Girls Learn, a global initiative focused on girl’s education.

But on a more personal level, the first couple stands as a moral contrast to Trump, whose three marriages have been longtime tabloid fodder.

The Obamas marked their 24th wedding anniversary this month, and a 12-page cover story in the October edition of Essence magazine celebrated their marriage under the title “Grace & Power.” The package included photos of the Obamas gazing at each other while holding hands.

The president, while promoting policies for women and girls, has often spoken admiringly about being surrounded in the White House by strong women, including his mother-in-law, Marian Robinson.

At the town-hall event, President Obama jokingly told a young woman, who asked for advice on balancing work and family, that her husband “should just do what you tell him to do, which has worked very well in my house.”

On Thursday, the first lady took a more serious tone, when she contrasted Trump’s lewd comments to the example set inside the White House’s living quarters.

“I can tell you that the men in my life do not talk about women like this,” she said. “And I know that my family is not unusual. And to dismiss this as everyday locker-room talk is an insult to decent men everywhere.”