The former first lady shared her feelings in a clip from “The Light Podcast,” admitting that saying goodbye to the White House and resentment over Donald Trump’s election led to her crying for a half-hour.
Michelle Obama will never forget Jan. 20, 2017, the day Donald Trump took office as president, and she found herself so emotionally overcome that she shed a lot of tears.
The former first lady shared her true feelings in a clip from her “The Light Podcast,” which debuted Tuesday on Audible. According to CNN, she admitted that leaving the White House for the last time and resentment over Trump’s election led her to “uncontrollable sobbing” for 30 minutes straight onboard her final Air Force One flight.
“After the inauguration — and we know whose inauguration we were at — that day was so emotional [for] so many different reasons,” Obama recalled, CNN reported. “We were leaving the home we had been in for eight years, the only home our kids really knew.”
Obama noted that although her two daughters had memories of Chicago — where she and her husband, former President Barack Obama, first met and began their family — the White House was where they had spent most of their time. Ultimately, they had to say “goodbye to the staff and all the people who helped to raise them,” she added.
The podcast’s recording is from the former first lady’s most recent tour promoting “The Light We Carry,” her third book, reflecting on how she has coped with relationships, self-doubt and anxiety in challenging times. It includes conversations from her six-city tour to promote and talk about her best-selling project alongside impressive moderators like Oprah Winfrey, Tyler Perry, Conan O’Brien and David Letterman.
Obama expressed her desire that the podcast will encourage listeners to “share your own light” while promoting it on Twitter on Monday.
In the years following her exit from the White House, the Grammy Award-winning author has shared several details about her feelings the day Trump was sworn in, including the fact that she “stopped even trying to smile” during the event.
Obama acknowledged in the clip that she “had to hold it together,” despite not being in a “good mood” that day.
She also poked fun at the numbers of those attending the inauguration of her husband’s successor, contending that there weren’t actually as many people there as purported, contrary to the Trump administration’s long-standing boast that it was the largest-ever turnout.
“There were tears, there was that emotion,” Obama said of that day, according to CNN. And it wasn’t easy to be on stage and “watch the opposite of what we represented on display,” she said, noting that “there was no diversity, there was no color [and] there was no reflection of the broader sense of America.”
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