In her new memoir, Becoming, Michelle Obama has expressed dismay that so many American women chose ‘misogynist’ Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton, the first female nominee of a major party. The former first lady admits that some news stories now ‘turn her stomach’ and, as her husband Barack Obama’s legacy is aggressively unravelled, she sometimes wonders ‘where the bottom might be’.
Obama recounts election night 2016, when the couple watched results at the White House cinema. As returns came in, she felt ‘anxiety hardening into dread’. Unable to stay up, she went to bed hoping to ‘block it all out’. She admits she wanted to not know the fact of Trump’s victory ‘for as long as I possibly could’.
The Obamas’ daughters, Malia and Sasha, were ‘deeply rattled’ by the result. Obama refrains from analysing the causes of Clinton’s loss, but says she will ‘always wonder about what led so many women, in particular, to reject an exceptionally qualified female candidate and instead choose a misogynist as their president’.
On inauguration day, Obama describes the event as ‘overwhelmingly white and male’, a ‘dispiriting uniformity’. She stopped trying to smile, realising that ‘maybe it did’ reflect the president’s reality. Nearly two years on, Trump’s cabinet remains dominated by middle-aged white men.
Despite polls suggesting she would beat Trump in a 2020 election, Obama again quashes talk of a presidential run, stating in the epilogue: ‘Because people often ask, I’ll say it here directly.’
