Michelle Obama Talks Losing Hope After Trump Elected and Sadness Over Obama Admin’s Shortcomings: ‘We Ourselves Were Not Enough’

Former First Lady Michelle Obama gets candid in her new memoir about the aftermath of the 2016 election and her feelings towards the work of her husband’s administration.

In an exclusive sneak peek with NPR, excerpts from her much anticipated memoir The Light We Carry were released.

The former first lady spoke about reeling from the 2016 election results and the state of shock that came with seeing former President Donald Trump unravel what her husband, former President Barack Obama, had worked to accomplish.

“I couldn’t help but return to the choice our country had made to replace Barack Obama with Donald Trump. What were we to take from that? Barack and I always tried to operate on the principles of hope and hard work, choosing to overlook the bad in favor of the good, believing that most of us shared common goals, and that progress could be made and measured however incrementally over time,” she began.

Obama elaborated that the same principles led the family straight to the White House.

“We tried to live those principles out loud, recognizing that we made it as far as we had despite, and maybe even in defiance of the bigotry and bias so deeply embedded in American life, we understood that our presence as black people in the White House said something about what was possible, and so we doubled down on the hope and hard work trying to fully inhabit that possibility,” she continued.

But then came 2016 election — which “still hurts” for Michelle Obama.

“Whether or not the 2016 election was a direct rebuke of all that, it did hurt. It still hurts. It shook me profoundly to hear the man who’d replaced my husband as president openly and unapologetically using ethnic slurs, making selfishness and hate somehow acceptable, refusing to condemn white supremacists or to support people demonstrating for racial justice,” Obama said.

Michelle elaborated that despite the progressive direction President Obama has sent the country in, it had simply not been enough.

“It shocked me to hear him speaking about differentness as if it were a threat,” she said regarding Trump. “It felt like something more — something much uglier than a simple political defeat. Running behind all this was a demoralizing string of thoughts. It had not been enough. We ourselves were not enough. The problems were too big. The holes were too giant, impossible to fill.”

The former First Lady had particular trouble coming to terms with Trump during the Covid-19 lockdowns.

“Stuck in my house over the frightening early months of 2020. I saw no logic to any of it. What I saw was a president whose lack of integrity was reflected in an escalating national death count, and whose poll numbers were still decent,” she said.

“I kept on with the work I’d been doing, speaking at virtual voter registration drives, supporting good causes, acknowledging people’s pain. But privately I was finding it harder to access my own hope, or to feel like I could make an actual difference,” Obama concluded.

Listen above via NPR.