Former first lady Michelle Obama is opening up about her decision to skip President Trump’s second inauguration, saying she made the call that was best for her wellbeing.
Obama said during an episode of her podcast with her brother Craig Robinson, which featured Taraji P. Henson and was released on Wednesday, that the choices she made at the start of the year were met with “ridicule and criticism.”
“It took everything in my power to not do the thing that was right or that was perceived as right but do the thing that was right for me,” she said. “That was a hard thing for me to do.”
Obama received much attention over her decision not to attend Trump’s swearing-in, which took place at the Capitol in January. Former President Obama, along with former Presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton and former first ladies Laura Bush and Hillary Clinton, attended the inauguration.
Allies of the former first lady, who served from 2009 to 2017, said at the time that she was making a statement by not attending after campaigning hard against Trump throughout 2024.
Obama said she is always prepared with proper clothes to wear for any event coming up but told her team she didn’t want to have a dress ready because “it’s just so easy to say, ‘Let me do the right thing.’”
Obama said she’s still working on “doing things just solely for myself and being OK with that.”
She had also addressed her decision not to attend the inauguration earlier this month during an appearance on actress Sophia Bush’s podcast “Work in Progress.”
With Michelle Obama, unlike her husband, also choosing not to attend former President Jimmy Carter’s funeral shortly before the inauguration, rumors swirled online about the status of her marriage.
“I mean, so much so that this year people… they couldn’t even fathom that I was making a choice for myself that they had to assume that my husband and I are divorcing,” she told Bush.
“This couldn’t be a grown woman just making a set of decisions for herself, right?” she said.