Former first lady Michelle Obama took Donald Trump to task in her forthcoming memoir, including for his “birther” movement theories, which she said were “deliberately meant to stir up the wingnuts and kooks.”
An advance copy of Obama’s book “Becoming”— set to be released Tuesday — states how on the night Trump beat Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, she consciously tried to “block it all out” of her mind.
Obama, 54, said she thought Trump was “grandstanding” in June 2015 when he announced his presidential bid, according to the Associated Press.
Trump began campaigning and trying to prove he was serious about seeking elected office. In the fall of 2015, a recording from “Access Hollywood” that featured the then-billionaire businessman and reality TV star talking about how he could “grab” women “by the pussy” was released.
Obama said she was stunned and her body physically “buzzed with fury” after hearing Trump make those comments.
Trump went on to become the Republican nominee for president and met up with Clinton at one of the debates in the fall of 2016. Obama said his behavior during the debate, in which he tried to “stalk” Clinton on the stage, was jarring. She called it an attempt to “diminish her presence.”
The former first lady said she is still confused why many women picked Trump, a man she described as a “misogynist,” to be president. She said Clinton was an “exceptionally qualified female candidate.”
Obama believes Trump’s view is that, “I can hurt you and get away with it.”
Specifically, Obama takes aim at Trump’s comments regarding her husband’s country of birth. For several years, Trump peddled the belief that Barack Obama wasn’t born in Hawaii, but was actually born in Kenya, which would have disqualified him from the presidency, a conspiracy theory that was commonly known as “birtherism” during the years the Obama family were in the White House.
“The whole thing was crazy and mean-spirited, of course, its underlying bigotry and xenophobia hardly concealed,” Obama wrote in her memoir. “But it was also dangerous, deliberately meant to stir up the wingnuts and kooks.”
An early peek inside Michelle Obama’s book
“Donald Trump, with his loud and reckless innuendos, was putting my family’s safety at risk. And for this I’d never forgive him.” https://t.co/Dzzq079KSW [1]
— Amy Argetsinger (@AmyArgetsinger) November 9, 2018 [2]
To this day, reports have surfaced that Trump, in speaking with people at the White House, had revived the false claims, telling others once again that he didn’t believe Obama was born in America [3].