Michelle Obama punished President Donald Trump because of Wednesday’s Capitol riots, calling him “childish and unpatriotic” before making an emotional critique of how the police responded to the crowd in comparison to Black Lives Matter protests in this summer.
In a statement published on social media on Thursday, the former first lady said the riots were “a fulfillment of the wishes of a childish and unpatriotic president who cannot deal with the truth about his own failures”.
Trump supporters arrived at the Capitol on Wednesday after the president made a speech at a rally against the election results, falsely claiming that the election was stolen from him and encouraging the crowd to fight. The march soon turned to chaos and bloodshed after a group of protesters violated the Capitol building, taking control of the Senate House and forcing lawmakers and reporters to hide. In response, Trump posted a video on social media repeating more electoral falsehoods and saying to supporters, “We love you.”
Obama also addressed the police response, which she suggested would have been much stronger if the protesters were black. “What if these hooligans looked like the people who go to Ebenezer Baptist Church every Sunday?” she said. “What would have been different?”
“To see the gulf between the responses to yesterday’s riots and this summer’s peaceful protests and the larger movement for racial justice is so painful,” she added. “It hurts … in city after city, day after day, we saw cracked skulls and mass arrests, pepper spray law enforcement in a peaceful demonstration for a presidential photo.”
Obama compared athletes kneeling during the national anthem, which Trump and his allies vehemently criticized as disrespectful of the flag, to Wednesday’s “anti-patriotic” scene, saying that he “made it painfully clear that certain Americans are, in fact, allowed to denigrate the our nation’s flag and symbols. They just have to look the right way. “
Obama ended by saying, “Even in the dark, there are glimpses of hope.” The road to recovery is not for anyone, politician or political party. But together, by entering with “honest and unwavering love for our country”, healing can begin.
Both Barack and Michelle Obama avoided criticizing their successors during the beginning of Trump’s presidency. As the 2020 campaign intensified and Covid-19 devastated the country, both began to manifest themselves more strongly. During her speech at the Democratic National Convention, the former first lady called Trump “the wrong president for our country”.
“He has had more than enough time to prove that he can do the job, but he is clearly lost,” she said. “He can’t find this moment. He just can’t be who we need him to be for us.”
