Former US
first lady Michelle Obama says she can “never forgive” Donald Trump for
questioning her husband’s American citizenship, saying the president and other
“birthers” put her family at risk, in her hotly anticipated new memoir.
Obama also
says she was surprised that so many American women voted for the “misogynist”
Trump over Hillary Clinton, “an exceptionally qualified female candidate,” in
the 2016 election.
The book,
“Becoming,” hits stores on Tuesday.
Obama, 54,
will head out on a multi-city arena tour to promote the memoir, with celebrity
friends like Oprah Winfrey and Reese Witherspoon tapped to moderate the events.
It is one
of the most awaited books about US politics in years, and Obama does not mince
words about her husband’s successor — and his involvement in promoting the idea
that Barack Obama was born abroad.
“The whole
[birther] thing was crazy and mean-spirited, of course, its underlying bigotry
and xenophobia hardly concealed,” she writes, in excerpts of the book published
by ABC News and The Washington Post.
“But it
was also dangerous, deliberately meant to stir up the wingnuts and kooks,” she
adds.
“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.”
Obama also
said her body “buzzed with fury” after hearing the “Access Hollywood” tape on
which Trump bragged about being able to grab women with impunity.
Trump did
not waste time in responding.
“Michelle
Obama got paid a lot of money to write a book and they always insist you come
up with controversy. I’ll give you some back,” he told reporters at the White
House before heading on a trip to France.
“I’ll
never forgive him for what he did to our United States military by not funding
it properly. (…) What he did to our military made this country unsafe.”
In the
book, America’s first black first lady goes beyond politics, digging deep into
some personal issues from a miscarriage to using in-vitro fertilisation to
conceive her daughters to marriage counselling.
“I felt
lost and alone, and I felt like I failed because I didn’t know how common
miscarriages were because we don’t talk about them,” Obama told ABC News in an
interview.
“We sit in
our own pain, thinking that somehow we’re broken.”
Fertility
treatments allowed her to conceive daughters Malia, now 20, and Sasha, 17.
“It turns
out that even two committed go-getters with a deep love and robust work ethic
can’t will themselves into being pregnant,” she writes.
“We had to
do IVF,” she told ABC, in excerpts of an interview that will air in full on
Sunday.
She
revisits the thrill of her romance with Barack, which began when she was his
advisor at a Chicago law firm, describing it as a “toppling blast of lust,
gratitude, fulfillment, wonder.”
But she
admits the couple on occasion turned to counselling, where they “learned how to
talk out” problems.
Upon
Trump’s election, the Obamas faded from the spotlight for a time, retreating to
their mansion in an upscale area of the US capital and refraining from overtly
political statements.
That
silence has now passed, with the former president campaigning actively for
Democratic candidates in the run-up to the midterm elections and the former
first lady speaking at get-out-the-vote rallies.
Michelle
Obama will have more opportunity to speak out as her book tour, which begins in
her hometown Chicago, rolls on to New York, Washington, Los Angeles, Boston and
other cities.
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