Michelle Obama has finally clarified why she did not attend President Donald Trump’s inauguration earlier this year.
The former first lady’s absence on Jan. 20, coming soon after she skipped President Jimmy Carter’s funeral, caused a bit of a stir, as theories began circling about the state of her marriage to former President Barack Obama.
“People couldn’t believe that I was saying no for any other reason; they had to assume that my marriage was falling apart,” Obama said of her husband’s solo outings to both events. “It took everything in my power to not do the thing that was perceived as right, but do the thing that was right for me. That was a hard thing for me to do.”
Internet sleuths and MAGA loyalists went into overdrive with speculation about the former first lady and her marriage to Barack Obama after she failed to appear at both events, which are seen as obligatory for former presidents and their spouses. She would have been seated next to Trump during Carter’s funeral.
On Wednesday’s episode of her podcast, IMO With Michelle Obama and Craig Robinson, which she co-hosts with her brother, Obama said she went with “the choice that was right for me.”
She revealed that she had to “basically trick” herself to skip the inauguration of the country’s 47th president.
“It started with not having anything to wear,” Obama said of the moment she made her decision. “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.’”
She said she knew that if her team didn’t prepare a dress for her, she wouldn’t be able to wimp out.
Obama said she’s just trying to practice the “art of saying no” when it feels right.
“It’s a muscle that you have to build,” she said. “And I think we suffered, because it’s almost like we started training late in life to build that muscle, right? I am just now starting to build it.”
She stressed how important it is to learn that practice, especially for young women.
“I want our daughters, I want the young women out there… I want my girls to start practicing different strategies for saying no,” Obama said.
She added: “After all that I’ve done in this world, if I am still showing them that I have to keep—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.”
The siblings were joined on the episode by actress Taraji P. Henson, who candidly shared what it’s like in the spotlight and the criticism she and Obama face as Black women.
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