Former first lady Michelle Obama is trending on Twitter for what is revealed in her new memoir.
In public speeches, when giving her opinion on the current state of the U.S., Obama never refers to President Trump by name. But in her new 426-page book, “Becoming,” she mentions her disdain for Trump.
Obama says she believes that Trump “put her family’s safety at risk with his vehement promotion of the false birther conspiracy theory,” according to The Washington Post, which received an advance copy of the memoir to be released on Tuesday.
“The whole [birther] thing was crazy and mean-spirited, of course, its underlying bigotry and xenophobia hardly concealed. But it was also dangerous, deliberately meant to stir up the wingnuts and kooks,” she writes.
“What if someone with an unstable mind loaded a gun and drove to Washington What if that person went looking for our girls Donald Trump, with his loud and reckless innuendos, was putting my family’s safety at risk. And for this I’d never forgive him.”
Trump spread the birther lie about Obama as a strategy to boost his own profile and perpetuate racism.
“In early 2011, Donald Trump began doing two things: trying to raise his profile among influential Republicans and publicly spreading the lie that Barack Obama was not born in the United States,” according to a New York Times column.
“So, from the very beginning, a false claim about a dark-skinned American not really being an American has been central to Trumpism. Now the idea appears to have become part of federal policy.”
On Friday, Trump, who did not serve in Vietnam and instead got a total of five deferments, responded to Obama’s comments saying her husband “depleted” the military:
“I’ll give you a little controversy back, I’ll never forgive (President Barack Obama) for what he did to our U.S. military. It was depleted, and I had to fix it. What he did to our military made this country very unsafe for you and you and you.”
Obama’s memoir doesn’t focus on Trump, but is divided into three parts: Becoming Me, Becoming Us, Becoming More.
She writes about her time in the White House as the first Black first lady:
“I was female, Black and strong, which to certain people . . . translated only to ‘angry.’ It was another damaging clich, one that’s been forever used to sweep minority women to the perimeter of every room . . . I was now starting to actually feel a bit angry, which then made me feel worse, as if I were fulfilling some prophecy laid out for me by the haters.”
Obama also shares stories on her upbringing, her education, meeting and dating Barack Obama, marriage and motherhood.
For example, she shares, for the first time, that after suffering a miscarriage, the couple’s daughters, Malia and Sasha, were conceived through in vitro fertilization.
Obama said, in February, that writing her memoir, “has been a deeply personal experience. I talk about my roots and how a girl from the South Side found her voice. I hope my journey inspires readers to find the courage to become whoever they aspire to be.”
