Forever First Lady Michelle Obama had time on Sunday. While promoting her autobiography Becoming in London, she throw some not-so-subtle shade at the sitting U.S. president.
While being interviewed by late-night host Stephen Colbert, Obama threw a couple of combination jabs at President Donald Trump, starting with his legal trouble and taking it all the way up to his behavior…and yet still managed never to mention Trump’s name, as the Independent reports. What an icon.
“For anyone who had any problems with Barack Obama, let’s just think about what we were troubled by…there were never any indictments,” Obama quipped before the crowd at the O2 Arena.
Obama also compared America today to being like a young child from a “broken” family, who thought hanging out with our divorced dad (or Trump) would be fun and cool, only to get sick of it.
“We come from a broken family, we are a little unsettled,” Obama added. “Sometimes you spend the weekend with divorced dad. That feels like fun but then you get sick. That is what America is going through. We are living with divorced dad.”
And if you thought that was the last of the former first lady’s digs, you would be wrong. When describing her family’s transition to Washington, Obama emphasized that her family was always just a “normal family” who had no time to “adjust to the rarified air of politics.”
“We were always ourselves – the presidency does not change who you are, it reveals who you are,” she said in another apparent swipe at the current president. “It’s like swimming in the ocean with great waves. If you are not a great swimmer, you are not going to learn in the middle of a tidal wave. You are going to resort to your kicking and drowning and what you knew how to do in the pool.”
With all that being said, Obama acknowledged that it was hard for her to watch the news at the moment, generally pacing herself when it comes to the inundation of information.
“When I am not emotionally able to deal with it I turn it off for a moment,” she said. “I only let some of that stuff into my world when I’m ready. You can’t have a steady diet of fear and frustration coming in.”
But of course, Obama wouldn’t be Obama if she didn’t also have a positive note to end on, leaving her audience with some hope.
“This may feel like a dark chapter but any story has its highs and lows but it continues. Yes, we are in a low but we have been lower. We have had tougher times, we have had more to fear. We have lived through slavery, the Holocaust and segregation,” she told her audience, according to the Independent. “We have always come out at the other end – better and stronger. We are moving in a direction of diversity and inclusion. No one ever said it would be easy. We are just in the throes of the uneasy path of change.”