A feud has now erupted between President Trump and former First Lady Michelle Obama, and it’s all very Trumpian.
According to The Hill, the former First Lady excoriates the current President in her upcoming memoir, titled “Becoming,” in which she announces she will “never forgive” President Trump for spreading the birther conspiracy in the years leading up to his 2016 candidacy. She writes:
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. 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.
While the birther conspiracy was indeed ridiculous, it did not begin with President Trump. Though the conspiracy’s origins are hard to trace, it is undeniable that Hillary Clinton helped push it during the 2008 primary when her campaign aide Sidney Blumenthal sent a respected journalist from McClatchy over to Kenya to investigate the charge. Former McClatchy Washington Bureau chief James Asher admitted to this recently.
Michelle Obama has said nothing about her desire to forgive or not forgive Hillary Clinton over the whole birther affair. In fact, the First Lady endorsed Hillary in 2016.
The former First Lady also commented on the infamous “grab ’em by the p***y” comment that Trump uttered in the “Access Hollywood” tape, saying her “body buzzed with fury” when she heard it.
She wrote: “It was an expression of hatred that had generally been kept out of polite company, but still lived in the marrow of our supposedly enlightened society — alive and accepted enough that someone like Donald Trump could afford to be cavalier about it.”
President Trump has elected not to let Michelle Obama’s criticism of him slide and decided to hit back, alleging she wrote that passage to generate controversy for more book sales.
“She got paid a lot of money to write a book and they always expect a little controversy,” President Trump told reporters Friday morning.
The president then said he will “never forgive” President Obama for destroying the U.S. military and leaving him a mess to clean up.
“I’ll give you a little controversy back, I’ll never forgive [Barack Obama] for what he did to our United States military. By not funding it properly, it was depleted,” he said. “What he did to our military made this country very unsafe for you and you and you.”
Michelle Obama will be kicking off a 10-city book tour in her hometown of Chicago on Tuesday. Some, like Michael Moore, have pushed the former First Lady as a 2020 contender, though she has given no indication of ever planning to run.
“We have to run a beloved American. Obama became beloved the night of that convention and he was beloved from that moment on. It’s got to be like a Michelle Obama or a Sully Sullenberger,” Moore told MSNBC recently.