Michelle Obama said that living with President Donald Trump in the White House is like spending the weekend with a “divorced dad” who is making America “sick.”
The former first lady made the comparison in an interview Sunday with noted anti-Trump buffoon Stephen Colbert at a stop in London Sunday to promote her best-selling memoir, Becoming.
Michelle O compares Trump to “divorced dad”
America was doing just fine when her husband was in office, Obama said, but America is now like a teenager living in a broken family, the former first lady told a crowd of 15,000 at the O2 arena in London.
“We come from a broken family, we are a little unsettled,” she said “Sometimes you spend the weekend with divorced dad. That feels like fun but then you get sick,” adding, “That’s what America is going through right now. We are living with divorced dad.”
That was just one of several oblique snubs that Obama fired at the president throughout a 90-minute talk with Colbert. The former first lady dropped familiar platitudes, saying that Trump deals in the politics of “fear” and suggested that positive change can come but only if Americans vote him out of office. She continued:
It’s time for us to roll up our sleeves and if we are not happy with the state of things then, in democracies, we have votes. Yes, it’s low but we’ve had lower. We have had more to fear. We have lived through slavery, the Holocaust and segregation. We have always come out at the other end, better and stronger. We are moving in a direction of diversity and inclusion. There will be bumps in the road but change is hard and we are in the throes of that uneasy change.
Obama also wanted to “remind people” that her husband was elected twice and that “people thought [he] was smart.”
“That really did happen. People would have voted for him for a third time. What is going on today is true but what happened before was also true. That should give us some solace at some level. For eight years, the president they saw in their country was Barack Obama.
Ms. Obama repeated myths about her husband’s presidency, which supporters often claim was “scandal free”, and which she juxtaposed with what she called Trump’s “indictments.” The president has not been indicted for any crime, and he was exonerated of Russian collusion after a nearly two-year investigation. “For anyone who had any problems with Barack Obama, let’s just think about what we were troubled by –- there were never any indictments,” she said.
Zings Trump
The former first lady also made familiar complaints about the president’s inexperience, appearing to compare him to a swimmer who is out of his depth.
“The presidency doesn’t change who you are, it reveals who you are. It is like swimming in the ocean with great waves,” she said. “If you are not a great swimmer, you are not going to learn in the middle of a tidal wave. You are going to resort to your kicking and drowning and what you knew how to do in the pool.”
Since leaving the White House, the Obamas have occasionally criticized Trump, often indirectly and not by name. Sunday was not the first time Ms. Obama compared her husband’s “hope” with Trump’s “fear.” The former first lady admitted that she sometimes struggles to watch the news out of disgust.
“When I am not emotionally able to deal with it I turn it off for a moment,” she told Colbert. “I only let some of that stuff into my world when I’m ready. You can’t have a steady diet of fear and frustration coming in.”
Becoming has sold almost 10 millions copies, and is on its way to becoming the best-selling memoir in history.
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