Michelle Obama: Trump victory ‘still hurts’ after six years

Michelle Obama says six years after Donald Trump’s White House win, his victory “still hurts.”

“It felt like something more, something much uglier than a simple political defeat,” Obama said in a clip from the audio version of her forthcoming book, “The Light we Carry,” published Monday by NPR.

The part-self-help book, part-memoir is poised to be released on Tuesday.

“I couldn’t help but return to the choice our country had made to replace Barack Obama with Donald Trump. What were we to take from that?” Obama said.

“Barack and I always tried to operate on the principles of hope and hard work — choosing to overlook the bad in favor of the good, believing that most of us shared common goals and that progress could be made and measured, however incrementally, over time,” Obama said.

“We’d tried to live those principles out loud, recognizing that we made it as far as we had despite, and maybe even in defiance of, the bigotry and bias so deeply embedded in American life. We understood that our presence as Black people in the White House said something about what was possible,” Obama said as she read from the pages of her book.

That’s why, when Trump won the presidency in 2016 after Obama’s eight years in office, the former first lady said, the election results hit her so hard.

“Whether or not the 2016 election was a direct rebuke of all that, it did hurt. It still hurts,” Obama said.

“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,” she said of Trump.

“It shocked me to hear him speaking about differentness as if it were a threat,” Obama, 58, continued.

“Running behind all this was a demoralizing string of thoughts: It had not been enough. We ourselves were not enough. The problems were too big. The holes are too giant, impossible to fill.”

Obama said while historians and pundits will undoubtedly study Trump’s 2016 win over Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton “for a long time to come,” in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, she couldn’t analyze it in such a way.

“Stuck in my house over the frightening early months of 2020, I saw no logic to any of it. What I saw was a president whose lack of integrity was reflected in an escalating national death count and whose poll numbers were still decent,” the best-selling “Becoming” author exclaimed.

Obama — who famously told voters in her 2016 Democratic National Convention speech, “When they go low, we go high,” — said while she plowed on with her post-executive mansion work by engaging in voter registration efforts and “acknowledging people’s pain,” behind closed doors she was reeling.

“Privately I was finding it harder to access my own hope, or to feel like I could make an actual difference,” Obama said.

For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to The Hill.