Michelle Obama Said She Was "Uncontrollably Sobbing" After President Trump's Inauguration

Michelle Obama's new podcast is already getting everyone in their feelings. In a teaser clip released yesterday, she explained how parents (and people in general) should spread gladness instead of pointing out shortcomings, and today, she went a full 180 from that and explained the rush of feelings that came after she and President Barack Obama departed the White House in the wake of President Donald Trump's inauguration in 2017.

“When those doors shut, I cried for 30 minutes straight, uncontrollable sobbing, because that’s how much we were holding it together for eight years,” Obama explained in the debut episode of The Light Podcast on Audible. 

It was a combination of many things, she elaborated, not just the obvious fact that there was a shift in the political sphere. It was about her children, too.

“After the inauguration — and we know whose inauguration we were at — that day was so emotional on so many different reasons. We were leaving the home we had been in for eight years, the only home our kids really knew,” Obama shared. “They remembered Chicago, but they had spent more time in the White House than anywhere. So, we were saying goodbye to the staff and all the people who helped to raise them."

Obama went on to say that it was hard for her to sit through the ceremony and see that everything she and Barack had worked for, like diversity, seemed to be lost as a new president took office.

“There were tears, there was that emotion. But then to sit on that stage and watch the opposite of what we represented on display — there was no diversity, there was no color on that stage, there was no reflection of the broader sense of America,” Obama said. 

Obama has opened up about the moment in the past. Speaking to Jimmy Fallon in 2018, she shared that she “stopped even trying to smile” during Trump’s inauguration.