Michelle Obama Talks Pressure of Being First Lady, Shades Trump on ‘Colbert’

Michelle Obama, fresh off the release of her best-selling memoir Becoming, is still making press rounds. She showed up on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert to promote the book, as well as address a number of other topics. Their talk had to be edited to fit TV, but the full thing is available on YouTube.

During the chat, Michelle touched on how she feels about Donald Trump and how perfect she and Barack Obama needed to present themselves 

“When you’re the first of anything the bar feels higher. You don’t have room to make mistakes,” she told Colbert. “One of the things I don’t talk about in the new book, but I talk about on the road is that I do remember at the end of that last flight that we took out when I was leaving from the Capitol, we waved and got on Air Force One for the last time…I cried for about 30 minutes. It was the release of eight years of feeling like we had to do everything perfectly. We couldn’t slip, our tone had to be perfect. That was the bar that was set for us.”

She was also passive when asked about her feelings on Trump.  “I have been very clear how I felt about that, I gave a speech about it at the 2016 convention” she explained. “The question we have to ask ourselves is, how does the country feel about it? The country has to ask itself, what do we want, what is the bar we are setting for ourselves? What kind of moral leadership do we demand in the White House? If we vote for one set of behavior, then that’s obviously what we want, until we vote differently.”

Michelle did sneak some between-the-lines criticism, though. “The margin of error was small, and we felt that,” she told Colbert. “Barack couldn’t golf. You know, we could just start there. There’s so much that would have been an outrage for us and we knew it. There wasn’t any room for anybody in our administration to be indicted…. We had to be highly ethical. We showed our taxes, we divested our money. This isn’t shade. This is just the sort of stuff we had to think about doing.”

Of course, she insisted, “This isn’t shade, it’s truth.” Watch the full interview above.