Former First Lady Michelle Obama says she can verify that the crowd for Donald Trump’s inauguration in January of 2017 was indeed tiny, and all of the “alternative facts” in the world can’t change that fact.
On the latest episode of “Michelle Obama: The Light Podcast,” Mrs. Obama recalls what it was like to leave the White House after her husband had been president for eight years, according to The Washington Post.
“We were leaving the home we had been in for eight years, the only home our kids really knew,” Obama says of her daughters, Malia and Sasha. “They remembered Chicago, but they had spent more time in the White House than anywhere, so we were saying goodbye to the staff and all the people who helped to raise them.”
Arriving at Trump’s inauguration, Obama said, was very disappointing.
“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. … But you had to hold it together like you do for eight years.”
The former first lady then noted just how sparse the attendance was for Trump’s swearing in:
“You walk through the Capitol, you wave goodbye, you get on Marine One, and you take your last flight flying over the Capitol, where there weren’t that many people there — we saw it, by the way.”
You probably recall that numerous Trump administration officials claimed, as then-press secretary Sean Spicer incorrectly asserted, it was “the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration — period — both in person and around the globe.”
The largest audience to ever witness an inauguration was probably in 2009, when Barack Obama was sworn in for the first time, the only African-American in U.S. history to ever be elected to the office of the presidency.
