Michelle Obama says Donald Trump's victory 'still hurts' 6 years later
- Michelle Obama's new book, "The Light We Carry: Overcoming in Uncertain Times," came out in November.
- In the book, the former first lady writes that Donald Trump's 2016 victory "still hurts."
Michelle Obama didn't mince words when writing about former President Donald Trump in her new book, "The Light We Carry: Overcoming in Uncertain Times."
Part self-help, part memoir, "The Light We Carry" features the former first lady's reflections on her post-White House life, strategies for navigating uncertain times, and advice on building meaningful relationships.
Obama wrote that the isolation of the pandemic caused her to dwell on unresolved questions in her life, including Trump's victory in the 2016 election that "still hurts" six years later.
"Barack and I always tried to operate on the principles of hope and hard work — choosing to overlook the bad in favor of the good, believing that most of us shared common goals and that progress could be made and measured, however incrementally, over time," she wrote.
She continued, "We'd tried to live those principles out loud, recognizing that we made it as far as we had despite, and maybe even in defiance of, the bigotry and bias so deeply embedded in American life. We understood that our presence as Black people in the White House said something about what was possible, and so we'd doubled down on the hope and hard work, trying to fully inhabit that possibility.
"Whether or not the 2016 election was a direct rebuke of all that, it did hurt. It still hurts. It shook me profoundly to hear the man who'd 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. It shocked me to hear him speaking about diferentness as if it were a threat. It felt like something more, something much uglier, than a simple political defeat."
Obama also denounced Trump in her 2018 memoir, "Becoming," writing that she'd "never forgive" Trump for putting her family's safety at risk with his "birther" conspiracy theory questioning her husband's US citizenship.