Michelle Obama has described how after leaving Donald Trump’s inauguration in January 2017, she broke into “uncontrollable sobbing”.
The former first lady was speaking on The Light Podcast, her new venture which launched on Tuesday.
She also made fun of the size of Trump’s inauguration crowd, a notorious sore point with the 45th president, and more seriously noted the lack of diversity and colour onstage at the Capitol on 20 January 2017 as Trump was sworn in.
Obama’s podcast accompanies The Light We Carry, her second book since leaving the White House, after the memoir Becoming. The podcast is based on conversations in front of live audiences, with moderators including Oprah Winfrey, Tyler Perry and David Letterman.
Describing her last trip with her husband, Barack Obama, on a presidential plane, after the inauguration of his successor, Michelle Obama said: “When those doors shut, I cried for 30 minutes straight, uncontrollable sobbing, because that’s how much we were holding it together for eight years.”
She added: “After the inauguration – and we know whose inauguration we were at – that day was so emotional on so many different reasons. We were leaving the home we had been in for eight years, the only home our kids really knew.”
When the Obamas left the White House their daughters, Malia and Sasha, were 18 and 15, respectively.
“They remembered Chicago but they had spent more time in the White House than anywhere,” Obama said. “So we were saying goodbye to the staff and all the people who helped to raise them.”
Trump’s inauguration speech focused on a theme of “American carnage”, in angry and stark contrast to Barack Obama’s message of hope eight years before.
On the dais, the former president George W Bush was famously reported to have called Trump’s speech “some weird shit”.
Michelle Obama said: “There were tears, there was that emotion. But then to sit on that stage and watch the opposite of what we represented on display – there was no diversity, there was no color on that stage, there was no reflection of the broader sense of America.”
Trump fixated on the size of his crowd, small next to those for Obama, directing his press secretary to lie to reporters about it.
To laughter, Michelle Obama said: “You take your last flight off, flying over the Capitol, where there weren’t that many people there. We saw it.”
