Michelle Obama Reveals Trump's Failure to Invite Her for Official Portrait Unveiling at White House
Michelle Obama took a jab at Donald Trump during her appearance on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon on Wednesday, April 19, revealing she was never invited to the White House for the unveiling of her official portrait during his presidency.
Jokingly asking, "Who's she?" the former first lady shared her thoughts on the portrait hanging, saying, "It was really a beautiful experience. That's tradition. You do your official portraits. The next president is supposed to invite you back to hang them. We were never invited back."
On September 7, President Joe Biden welcomed the Obamas back to the White House for the first time in five years to hold an official portrait unveiling, an event that should have occurred during Trump's term. Michelle Obama donned a striking fuchsia and red ombre gown, while former President Barack Obama wore a navy suit as their portraits were presented in the East Room of the White House.
This isn't the first instance of Michelle Obama criticizing the former president. In her memoir, The Light We Carry, she expressed her concerns for the nation following the 2016 election.
In the book, she wrote, "It shook me profoundly to hear the man who replaced my husband as president openly and unapologetically using ethnic slurs, making selfishness and hate somehow acceptable, refusing to condemn white supremacists or to support people demonstrating for racial justice." The memoir, released in 2022, reflects on this period about six years after Trump assumed the presidency.
Michelle Obama also shared her emotional response to leaving the White House on her husband's final day as president, recalling on her podcast, "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."
Furthermore, the lawyer criticized Trump for the lack of diversity at his inauguration, saying, "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."