While there was a whole lot of policy to discuss on the day of President Donald Trump’s second inauguration — including his immediate flurry of executive orders — there was also plenty of attention on who didn’t attend his swearing-in. And now Michelle Obama is clearing the air about why she wasn’t there.
First, a little backstory: Obama’s absence from the inauguration made major waves, given that it’s customary for living former presidents and their spouses to attend every inaugural — although it’s worth noting that Trump himself broke the norm first when he opted out of showing up for Joe Biden’s oath of office. Michelle Obama’s decision not to attend Trump’s ceremony was seen as such a dramatic break with precedent, in fact, that it contributed to rumors of a possible Obama divorce, which the former first lady debunked recently.
In the latest episode of her new podcast IMO, Obama cleared the air about why she stayed away on Trump’s big day, describing her decision plainly as “the choice that was right for me.” That’s not exactly surprising, given that she’s castigated Trump’s style of politics as “embarrassing and ugly,” while he’s called her “nasty” and a “hater.” Even so, skipping his inauguration prompted a frustrating public response, Obama said.
“People couldn’t believe that I was saying no for any other reason — they had to assume that my marriage was falling apart,” she said. “It took everything in my power to not do the thing that was perceived as right, but do the things that was right for me; that was a hard thing for me to do.”
The decision was so difficult, Obama shared, that she actually instructed her team not to source wardrobe options for the inauguration. She knew that if she had no dress on deck, she wouldn’t be able to change her mind and show up at the last minute.
“It started with not having anything to wear,” she explained. “I was like, if I’m not going to do this thing, I got to tell my team I don’t even want to have a dress ready, right? Because it’s so easy to just say, Let me do the right thing.”
In conversation with her brother and podcast co-host Craig Robinson and celebrity guest Taraji P. Henson, Obama also revealed that she’s been in therapy since leaving the White House, which is helping her to sort through the complicated feelings she experienced during her husband’s presidency.
“Some of the most hurtful stuff that I experienced entering this life of public service at the heights that we entered into was, during my husband’s presidential campaign, just me telling the truth of who we were, you know, just humanizing him as a man. Saying, ‘He’s a great man, but he’s not perfect, you know? He’s got his foibles and his flaws,'” Obama said on the podcast. “The first thing that some female journalist said is that I was bitter. I was emasculating him, just by sort of trying to tell the truth about what life is, right? And then you get labeled as angry, you know, because you talk forcefully or passionately about something, even if it’s in the context of great joy and pride. The first label they put on us as Black women is that we are angry.”
But the former first lady says that as she comes to better understand how to honor her own feelings and desires, she hopes to pass that wisdom on to the next generation — including her daughters.
“I want my girls to start practicing different strategies for saying no,” she said. “After all that I’ve done in this world, if I am showing them that … I still have to show people that I love my country, that I’m doing the right thing, that I am always setting, going high all the time, even in the face of a lot of hypocrisy and contradiction, all I’m doing is keeping that crazy bar that our mothers and grandmothers set for us.”
