Politics - News Analysis

Michelle Obama Reveals How Trump Made Her Feel After He Refused to Invite Her to the WH for the Hanging of Her Official Portrait

It’s no secret that Michelle Obama is no fan of Donald Trump, and while appearing Wednesday on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, she explained one of the reasons why.

The former first lady and her former husband Barack Obama were not invited to the unveiling of their portraits during Trump’s presidency, according to OK! News.

It’s understandable that she was unhappy about this. It was a very pointed slight because the unveiling of presidential portraits has been a White House tradition since 1965.

So President Joe Biden righted this wrong by inviting the Obamas back to the White House on September 7, 2022. It was the first time the former first couple had visited the White House in five years. And during their visit, Biden unveiled the presidential portraits of the Obamas — something that Trump rudely neglected to do.

“Who’s she?” Michelle jokingly asked host Jimmy Fallon.

“It was really a beautiful experience,” she said of the portrait hanging. “That’s tradition. You do your official portraits. The next president is supposed to invite you back to hang them. We were never invited back.”

At the unveiling, the former first lady, a native of Chicago, wore a beautiful gown in shades of fuchsia and scarlet red, while the former president was sharply dressed in a navy blue suit. The beautiful portraits were unveiled in the East Room of the White House, thereby correcting Trump’s incredibly selfish gesture.

This isn’t the first time Michelle Obama has criticized Trump. In her memoir, The Light We Carry, she writes she was afraid for the nation after Trump was elected president in 2016.

“It shook me profoundly to hear the man who replaced my husband as president openly and unapologetically using ethnic slurs, making selfishness and hate somehow acceptable, refusing to condemn white supremacists or to support people demonstrating for racial justice,” she wrote.

She was also troubled by the lack of diversity at Trump’s inauguration. To her, it must have felt like a reversal of everything she and her husband had worked for during their time in office.

“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,” she said. “There was no reflection of the broader sense of America.”

It was, unfortunately, a sign of the times to come.

Trump siccing the National Guard on protesters demonstrating over the death of George Floyd. Trump describing white supremacists as “very fine people. Trump describing Hispanic people crossing the border as “bad hombres” and “rapists.” Because that’s how this man operates, and Michelle Obama undoubtedly had a sense of what was to transpire.

Her memoir was published in November 2022 and it focuses on the stressful years that came after Trump’s election. And in her book, she reflects on her and her husband’s final day at the White House and the emotional release she went through after keeping it together for eight years.

“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 said on her podcast.

Now, fortunately, she is thriving as a successful attorney and author. In 2020 she won a Grammy Award for Best Spoken Word Album. Meanwhile, the man who replaced her husband as president has become noted for becoming the first president in U.S. history to be impeached twice, and also the first to be indicted and arrested for his alleged role in the falsification of business records in the first degree.

Michelle Obama is, and always will be, a class act. The same cannot be said of Trump.

meet the author

Nicole Hickman James is a lifelong Democrat and political activist who first cut her teeth as a teenager volunteering for Mike Dukakis’ presidential campaign. She has worked and volunteered for John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, HFA (Hillary For America), and Organizing For Action. She’s passionate about liberal and progressive causes and considers President Obama her favorite president ever. She holds her Bachelor’s from Boston College in Economics and her Master's from Columbia, also in Economics. When not working as a writer, she enjoys traveling and spending time with her three college-aged children.

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