Michelle Obama Said She’d ‘Never Forgive’ Trump and Now He’s Pissed
Last year, Barack and Michelle Obama signed a massive, multimillion-dollar joint deal to write a pair of books for Penguin Random House. The former first lady’s memoir, Becoming, is finally due out next week—and it contains some pretty harsh words on Trump, the Washington Post reports.
Obama slams Trump as a “misogynist,” remembering how she “buzzed with fury” after hearing the then-candidate’s “grab ’em by the pussy” comments on that Access Hollywood tape, according to NBC News. But her disgust with Trump apparently goes back long before the 2016 election: She wrote that she’ll “never forgive him” for spreading those hateful, insidious birther conspiracies.
“The whole [birther] thing was crazy and mean-spirited, of course, its underlying bigotry and xenophobia hardly concealed,” she writes, according to the Post. “But it was also dangerous, deliberately meant to stir up the wingnuts and kooks.”
It’s the most candid we’ve seen Obama discuss the impact Trump has had on her and her family, and she doesn’t hold back.
“What if someone with an unstable mind loaded a gun and drove to Washington?” she writes. “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 reportedly writes that she originally assumed Trump was “grandstanding” when he announced his presidential bid, and was so devastated by his eventual win that she spent some time trying to “block it all out.”
After excerpts from the book came out, Trump responded to Obama’s words about how his disrespect and general assholery affected her life by, unsurprisingly, continuing to act like an asshole. On Friday morning, he lobbed some insults Obama’s way on the White House lawn, Deadline reports.
“I guess she wrote a book. She got paid a lot of money to write a book. And they always insist you come up with controversial,” Trump said. “Well, 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 properly, it was depleted. Everything was old and tired. And I came in and I had to fix it. So I’ll never forgive him for what he did to our military. I’ll never forgive him for what he did in many other ways—which I’ll talk to you about in the future.”
Both Barack and Michelle Obama have largely stayed away from commenting on Trump ever since he was elected, save for a few bland speeches and a Facebook post or two. Hopefully these passages in the new memoir point towards the Obamas taking a more direct stance against him moving forward—at least something more than just cranking out a Netflix series about how the new administration is a shit show or whatever.
Becoming is out in bookstores Tuesday, November 13.
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This article originally appeared on VICE US.