President Donald Trump has founded his time in the national spotlight on pushing his personality — but he’s definitely not winning on that front, as former First Lady Michelle Obama’s continued prominence exemplifies. This weekend in London on the latest leg of her tour supporting hew new memoir Becoming, she at times hilariously and overall forcefully picked apart the rise of Trump, painting it in the grim light it warrants and contrasting it strikingly with the platform her family and their allies continue to push.
As she shared quite simply:
‘Anyone who had any problems with Barack Obama, let’s just think about what we were troubled by — there were never any indictments.’
It’s true — no indictment-producing scandals ever rocked the Obama administration. Meanwhile, Trump’s time in office has been pockmarked by repetitive criminal charges targeting various current and former members of his inner circle. For instance, his longtime associate Roger Stone will be going to trial this fall over criminal charges stemming from his scheme to hide his plot to conspire with WikiLeaks, which distributed emails the Kremlin stole from Democrats. That’s pretty grim, no matter how many rhetorical smoke bombs the president throws in what might as well be nothing other than an attempt to distract the nation (and world).
Obama had some thoughts about that belligerence which has marked Trump’s time in office too, sharing:
‘Sometimes you spend the weekend with divorced dad. That feels like fun but then you get sick. That is what America is going through. We are living with divorced dad.’
At another point, she added:
‘The presidency does not change who you are, it reveals who you are… It is like swimming in the ocean with great waves. If you are not a great swimmer, you are not going to learn in the middle of a tidal wave. You are going to resort to your kicking and drowning and what you knew how to do in the pool.’
That’s pretty brutal, although of course not entirely surprising — Michelle Obama takes Trump as a divorced dad struggling to not slip under in the ocean who’s defined in large part by criminal charges. Not a good look!
The New York Times reported that Trump wanted to use threats to ship undocumented immigrants to jurisdictions that refuse to let their local police be used as an arm of federal immigration authorities to distract from the impending public release of a redacted version of the final report from Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation. In other words, he’s committed to an alarming degree to that belligerence that Michelle Obama is so concerned about.
He could soon be kicked out of the White House, if Democrats have their way next year. As for that possibility, the former First Lady asked her audience this past weekend to have at least some hope for the future, since “any story has its highs and lows but it continues.”
If current polling averages are to be believed, that future will most likely feature either former Vice President Joe Biden, Sen. Bernie Sanders, or former Congressman Beto O’Rourke, who lead the Democratic presidential primary field, in that order.
Featured Image via screenshot
