It remains to be seen if Michelle Obama’s new podcast is attracting loyal viewers, but it is certainly attracting media attention.
In the latest episode of IMO with Michelle Obama & Craig Robinson, the former first lady delivered a scathing monologue about how hard it is to be, well, her. The four-minute diatribe was part of a larger conversation with her brother (Robinson) and guest Taraji P. Henson about why women – specifically, women of color – need to learn to say no.
On Thursday’s show, Megyn was joined by Glenn Greenwald, host of Rumble’s System Update, to discuss Obama’s most recent gripes and what they reveal about her.
On Being First Lady
Just nine episodes into her latest podcast venture, Obama has made no shortage of eyebrow-raising confessions about her time as first lady, her relationship with her husband, and her views on marriage to name a few.
The latest edition dropped Wednesday and essentially functioned as a 69-minute airing of grievances in which Obama whined about the challenges of her adult life. After lamenting how black women don’t have permission to say “no” or talk about their “pain,” she recalled the ‘trauma’ of her eight years at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue:
“…So, I’m at this stage in life where I have to define my life on my terms for the first time. So, what are those terms? And going to therapy just to work all that out, like, what happened that eight years that we were in the White House? What did that do to me internally, my soul? We made it through. We got out alive. I hope we made the country proud. My girls, thank God, are whole. But what happened to me…”
Greenwald said the ‘woe is me’ schtick is nothing new. He noted the “glass is always empty for Michelle Obama” despite the fact that her husband overcame the odds to quickly rise through the ranks of the Democratic Party and become the first black president of the United States.
“To come out of all of that and focus not on the adulation, and the historical achievements, and the way in which the country has progressed to make that happen, but… to be like ‘how do I recover from that?’ as though she was kidnapped by ISIS for eight years and subjected to the most unthinkable abuses,” he explained. “It is like she is so addicted to being a victim – notwithstanding the fact that she is one of the least convincing victims – that you almost start to feel sorry for her.”
He believes her recollection of her time in Washington, D.C., reveals something deeper. “If you really think, as she seems to, that the eight years that she spent in the White House were devastating… [and] psychologically destructive, who is the person who was responsible for that,” Greenwald asked. “It was her husband, who she made very clear she never wanted to run for president and yet did so anyway against her wishes. I mean, imagine the resentment she has, not for the world, but for him.”
On Barack Obama
Perhaps unsurprisingly then, she once again brought up what she perceives to be Barack Obama’s shortcomings and took issue with how her criticisms of him were perceived by the press – something she blamed on race:
“…And also, as black women, we are so easily labeled as angry and bitter. And let me tell you some of the most hurtful stuff that I experienced, you know, entering this life of public service at the heights that we entered into was during my husband’s presidential campaign, and just me telling the truth of who we were, you know, just humanizing him as a man, saying… he’s a great man, but he’s not perfect. You know, he’s got his foibles and his flaws.
Trying to humanize him, the first thing that some female journalist said is that I was bitter, I was emasculating him just by sort of trying to tell the truth about what life is, right? And then you get labeled as angry because you talk forcefully or passionately about something even if it’s in the context of great joy and pride…”
Megyn wasn’t following the former first lady’s train of thought. “How did race get put into this,” she said. “What I see an unhappily married woman… Every time she comments on him, it is negative… But everything – everything – is about race for her. It has always been.”
On Race
To that point, Obama suggested her white girlfriends are not able to understand news or current events the way she does because of their skin color:
“…I am probably less light than many of my white female friends… because, I say this a lot, I mean, I see the difference in some of my white female friends. I see a lightness, and ability to be in the world, and see what’s going on but still be not as burdened about it as I think I am… I think that what I see happen in the news, you know, the assault on immigration rights… the challenges that face our community, the inequality. I think it burns at me in a different way…”
Megyn joked that there is only one way to take that. “She hates her friends and her husband,” she quipped. “It is her narcissism, but any criticism about her for it results in ‘you’re just thinking I’m an angry black woman; that’s your racism coming out.’ That is, I guess, what she thinks of her friends.”
On the Inauguration
Perhaps the most headline-making portion of the episode came when Obama talked about why she was noticeably absent from Donald Trump’s inauguration in January, leaving her husband to attend solo and rumors to fly:
“…My decision to skip the inauguration, you know, what people don’t realize, or my decision to make choices at the beginning of this year that suited me were met with such ridicule and criticism. Like, people couldn’t believe that I was saying ‘no’ for any other reason that they had to assume that my marriage was falling apart. You know?
It’s like, while I’m here really trying to own my life and intentionally practice making the choice that was right for me. And 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. That was a hard thing for me to do.
I had basically trick myself out of it, and it started with not having anything to wear. I mean, I had affirmatively– because I always prepared for any funeral, any thing. I walk around with the right dress. I travel with clothes just in case something pops off. So, I was like, if I’m not going to do this thing, I gotta tell my team. I don’t even want to have a dress ready, right? Because it’s so easy to just say, ‘Let me do the right thing’…”
In Megyn’s view, the excuse doesn’t track. “We don’t ask a lot of our former first ladies… They can go off and make their millions… Was it really such a big sacrifice to ask her to show up at the inauguration,” she wondered. “She talks about it like ‘I did what was right for me; something like I’ve never done before’… The same theme runs throughout all of it.”
Greenwald agreed. “She is so obsessed with the minutiae of her own life, but not even in an interesting, positive way,” he concluded. “It’s not, ‘Hey, I have this really extraordinary life I want to tell you about.’ It is this constant grievance accompanied by this extraordinary life that she doesn’t appreciate at all and wants everybody else to feel sorry for her because not everybody universally reveres her.”
You can check out Megyn’s full interview with Greenwald by tuning in to episode 1,056 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.