Former first lady Michelle Obama said she sobbed after leaving the White House and blasted former President Donald Trump’s inauguration for what she called a lack of diversity.
Obama made the comments in a recent episode of her new The Light Podcast shared with People magazine.
In the segment, she blasted Trump’s inauguration as small, lacking in diversity, and against her values.
“You walk through the Capitol, you wave goodbye, you get on Marine One, and you take your last flight flying over the Capitol, where there weren’t that many people there — we saw it, by the way!” she said.
The former first lady said the emotional nature of leaving the White House had her feeling a range of emotions.
“We were leaving the home we had been in for eight years, the only home our kids really knew,” she continued, referencing her two children, Malia, 24, and Sasha, 21. “They remembered Chicago, but they had spent more time in the White House than anywhere, so we were saying goodbye to the staff and all the people who helped to raise them.”
She then zoned in on the inauguration itself.
”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 continued. “There was no reflection of the broader sense of America.”
Obama continued to describe her experience leaving the White House for the last time.
“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.
Obama attended the inauguration on Jan. 20, 2017, with her children and husband, former President Barack Obama. Trump did not attend President Joe Biden’s inauguration in 2021.
