Former first lady Michelle Obama threw a few barbs at President Donald Trump while speaking to a group of women at the Simmons Leadership Conference in Boston on Thursday.
Asked whether she would consider a presidential run herself, Obama declined, saying that she already knows what she is good at, and being the president is not it.
“Just because I gave a good speech, and I’m smart and intelligent doesn’t mean I should be the next president. That’s been our problem. We’re very shortsighted about how we think about selecting the commander in chief.”
Obama then compared her husband’s administration to the Trump administration, saying that Barack Obama was like “having the ‘good parent’ at home. The responsible parent, the one who told you to eat your carrots and go to bed on time. And now we have the other parent. We thought it’d feel fun — maybe it feels fun for now because we can eat candy all day and stay up late and not follow the rules.”
Obama went on to lament the fact that she had tried over and over again, on the campaign trail, to tell people what the office of the presidency required. “You can’t just say you’re gonna pick the best advisors. Because every advisor is gonna give the president five different opinions … You have to be analytical, you have to be smarter than all of your advisors.”
The conversation eventually turned to Hillary Clinton, and Obama was asked to explain her view of “what happened.” The former first lady, like so many others, attributed Clinton’s loss to women who were “afraid” to embrace the idea of a woman in the presidency. “We’ve got to be willing, when we do find qualified people, to vote for them. And we didn’t do that in this election. So I think people should be less … disheartened that me and Oprah don’t want to run, and more disheartened by the fact that Hillary Clinton, probably the most qualified person to ever seek the office of the presidency, lost. She lost.”