If Barack and Michelle Obama are looking to quiet the rumors about their marital status, they might want to stop fanning the flames.
The former first lady attempted to clap back at those who have been suggesting her marriage is on the rocks earlier this month while being interviewed on a podcast, but then she proceeded to offer an unusual perspective on what it means to be married during an episode of her own show.
On Friday’s program, Megyn was joined by Maureen Callahan, host of The Nerve, to discuss Michelle’s recent comments and what they reveal about the couple.
The History
Michelle has raised eyebrows several times this year with her schedule. First, she missed Jimmy Carter’s funeral, then she skipped Donald Trump’s inauguration, and most recently she was not present with her husband and daughters at a dinner in Los Angeles in March.
When she dropped the first two episodes of her new IMO (a.k.a. in my opinion) podcast with her co-host and older brother Craig Robinson last month, she kicked things off with very candid revelations about how she viewed Barack’s presidential ambitions and their dynamic at home.
To that point, the former president told the president of Hamilton College earlier this month that he was “in a deep deficit with my wife” after leaving office, and he is apparently still trying to make it up to her. “I have been trying to dig myself out of that hole by doing occasionally fun things,” he said.
During an appearance on Sophia Bush’s Work in Progress podcast last week, Michelle brushed off her recent absences, claiming she now has the opportunity to control her own calendar and can now make “a choice for myself.”
“I could have made a lot of these decisions years ago, but I didn’t give myself that freedom,” she said. “And now that’s gone. And so now I have to look at my — I get to look at my calendar, which I did this year, was a real big example of me, myself looking at something that I was supposed to do — you know, without naming names — and I chose to do what was best for me, not what I had to do, not what I thought other people wanted me to do.”
She then acknowledged how those decisions have led to speculation. “That’s the thing that we as women, I think we struggle with like disappointing people,” Michelle continued. “I mean so much so that this year people were, you know — 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.”
The Latest
If that was meant to set the record straight, it is hard to understand why Michelle would have then gone on to make the comments she did on her own show this week. In an episode titled “Dating Should Be About Pursuing Joy” with Tracee Ellis Ross, the former first lady had a very interesting take on marriage.
While discussing dating, Michelle said she feels like people “don’t realize that, in long term relationships, you’re going to have deep, deep dips.” When Ross interjected that “you are going to have a bad year,” she countered with her own take on how long the “dips” last.
“I tell people – and folks think that this is harsh – it’s like you’re going to have a bad decade. I mean, I’ve been married to my husband for 30 plus years,” she said. “I mean, the truth is if you add it all up, even the year, if the odds were you’re going to be married to your partner for 50 years and 10 of those years could be bad, you’d sign up for it. You’d sign up for it, and that’s really how it works out.”
Megyn disagreed. “It’s not. I’ve been married for 17-and-a-half years and not one was bad. I think she and he married the wrong people,” she said. “Every word she says about Barack Obama is negative… Every time she opines, it’s something that reflects poorly on him – how he’s insensitive, how he’s not a talker, how he doesn’t know how to relate to people, he doesn’t keep the same schedule as she does. And now we’re talking about how you can have a bad decade in a marriage.”
What It Reveals
IMO with Michelle Obama & Craig Robinson, which promises “candid perspectives to a range of listeners’ personal dilemmas, from the everyday to the existential,” has been off to a slow start in the ratings department, and Callahan wondered if that has to do with the direction of the content.
“I can’t think of anybody I would go to for advice less than Michelle Obama. She really doesn’t know what she is talking about,” she said. “She loves to tell us she hated Barack for a good decade, but please teach me how to have a successful relationship with someone that you clearly respect and admire… I think that’s a very unhealthy position to take or to advise other people to gut it out for 10 years of misery.”
This latest podcast has done little, in Callahan’s view, to highlight anything other than Michelle’s lack of self-awareness. “Every time she is on the air, it’s like, ‘I’m dragging this ball of dead weight behind me. His name is Barack Obama. He’s bringing me down,’” she noted. “Does she not realize that by talking sh-t about her partner of decades – first black president of the United States – she is talking sh-t about herself? Lady, you chose him.”
You can check out Megyn’s full interview with Callahan by tuning in to episode 1,052 on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you like to listen. And don’t forget that you can catch The Megyn Kelly Show live on SiriusXM’s Triumph (channel 111) weekdays from 12pm to 2pm ET.