Michelle Obama is finally revealing why she missed President Trump’s inauguration in January.
The former first lady broke down the “hard” decision on the latest episode of her and brother Craig Robinson’s “IMO” podcast.
She called her headline-making choice the “right” one despite public “ridicule” while chatting with Taraji P. Henson.
The 61-year-old explained that she “basically tricked” herself into not attending the ceremony by making sure she did not “have anything to wear.”
Obama recalled, “I was like, if I’m not going to do this thing, I’ve got to tell my team. I don’t even want to have a dress ready, right?”
The former lawyer noted that if she did have event-ready clothes to wear, it would have been easy to say, “Let me do the right thing [and attend].”
Barack Obama, notably, was present at the inauguration — and Michelle clapped back at rumors that she wasn’t at her husband’s side that day due to the state of their romance.
“People couldn’t believe that I was saying no for any other reason,” the memoirist noted. “They had to assume that my marriage was falling apart.
“It took everything in my power to not do the thing that was perceived as right, but do the thing that was right for me. That was a hard thing for me to do,” she continued.
Michelle used this example as a lesson in the “art of saying no,” which is a “muscle” she is “just now starting to build.”
She said that her absence from Trump’s swearing-in was an example for “the young women out there … to start practicing different strategies for saying no.”
The “Becoming” author — who is the mother of daughters Malia, 26, and Sasha, 23 — added, “After all that I’ve done in this world, if … I still have to show people that I love my country, that I’m doing the right thing, that I am … going high all the time, all I’m doing is keeping that crazy bar that our mothers and grandmothers set for us.”
She has vowed to stand against this mindset — especially “in the face of a lot of hypocrisy and contradiction.”
Page Six previously reported that Michelle, who also skipped President Jimmy Carter’s funeral in January, has “checked out” of Washington, DC.
We heard she was a no-show at the inauguration later that same month because she’s “no phony” and has “always been very deliberate about where and how she shows up.”
As Barack, 63, has continued to step out solo, Michelle clarified on the “Work in Progress” podcast that they are still going strong after 32 years of marriage.
“If [our decisions don’t] fit into the sort of stereotype of what people think we should do, then it gets labeled as something negative and horrible,” she said last week.
The former president, meanwhile, spoke about their union’s ups and downs at Hamilton College earlier this month.
The politician explained that he tries to do “fun things” with his wife as a way to “dig [him]self out” of the “deep deficit” his eight-year presidency left him in.
The couple wed in 1992. They welcomed Malia and Sasha, who now live together in Los Angeles, in 1998 and 2001, respectively.
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