Michelle Obama: From Princeton to the White House — and Still No Gratitude
“You said ‘we were all too aware that as a first black couple, we couldn’t afford any missteps.’ And you also say ‘as a black woman, I was under a particularly white, hot glare.’ Did you feel that?”
Michelle Obama has led an undeniably charmed life. After graduating from Princeton University, she went on to earn a law degree from Harvard. Following a successful legal career, her husband was elected to the U.S. Senate — and, just a few years later, to the presidency. By any measure, hers has been a life of exceptional privilege and advantage.
Yet despite the many opportunities life has afforded her, she often comes across as one of the least grateful and most entitled public figures of her generation. And that impression was on full display in a preview clip from an upcoming interview with Good Morning America host Robin Roberts, set to air Sunday night.
“You said we were all too aware that as a first black couple, we couldn’t afford any missteps. And you also say as a black woman, I was under a particularly white, hot glare. Did you feel that?” Roberts asked.
“For sure,” Obama replied. “You can’t afford to get anything wrong because you didn’t get the — at least until the country came to know us.”
“We didn’t get the grace that I think some other [first] families have gotten,” she added.
Barack Obama’s election as the first black president was a historic moment for America, and I recall the media coverage being overwhelmingly positive. The press often portrayed him in near-reverential terms — at times even as a political “messiah” — and that tone carried well into both his presidency and post-presidency. Michelle Obama, meanwhile, was an exceptionally popular first lady and remains highly admired in liberal circles.
Michelle Obama complains: “We didn't get the grace that I think some other (first) families have gotten." pic.twitter.com/wgLY3TZqFD
— Western Lensman (@WesternLensman) October 31, 2025
This was far from the first time Obama has portrayed herself as a victim of racial bias. Perhaps her greatest hit of all time came in June 2020. Because graduations throughout the country had been canceled due to the COVID-19 lockdowns, she decided to honor all 2020 graduates via a virtual commencement message. Her address came one week after the death of George Floyd and the disingenuous, self-serving, former first lady had race on her mind.
Within 90 seconds, the topic turned to race. Not only have we had to deal with the pandemic, she told graduates, “but also by the rumbling of the age-old fault lines that our country was built on. The lines of race and power that are once again so nakedly exposed for all of us to grapple with.”
With one of the most sour expressions I’ve ever seen, she said, “What’s happening now is the direct result of decades of prejudice and inequality.”
“The truth is, when it comes to all those tidy stories of hard work and self-determination that we like to tell ourselves about America,” she said as she shook her head to indicate this was a lie, “the reality is a lot more complicated than that. Because for too many people in this country, no matter how hard they work, there are structural barriers working against them that just make the road longer and rockier.”
Rather than offering a message of hope and inspiration, Obama chose to reinforce the notion that minorities in America are helpless and that the odds are irreversibly stacked against them. In doing so, she fanned the flames of racial division at a moment when the country was already a tinderbox.
In a surreal May 2021 interview with CBS’s This Morning host Gayle King, she shared one of her biggest worries as a black mom. “Every time they [her daughters] get in a car by themselves, I worry about what assumption is being made by somebody who doesn’t know everything about them.”
She continued, “The fact that they are good students and polite girls, but maybe they’re playing their music a little loud, maybe somebody sees the back of their head and makes an assumption.”
“I, like so many parents of black kids, the innocent act of getting a license puts fear in our hearts.” Yes, she actually said that.
Um, Michelle. I’m pretty sure that those Secret Service agents who follow your kids around 24/7 would be on that pretty quickly.
Then she delivered another whopper about “all those Black Lives Matter kids.”
“Many of us blacks still live in fear as we go to the grocery store, walking our dogs. So, I think we have to talk about it more, and we have to ask our fellow citizens to listen a bit more and to believe us, and to know we don’t wanna be out there marching. I mean, all those Black Lives Matter kids, they’d rather not have to worry about this. They’re taking to the streets because they have to. They’re trying to have people understand that we’re real folks, and the fear that many have of so many of us is irrational, and it’s based on a history that is just — it’s sad, and it’s dark, and it’s time for us to move beyond that.”
Does she really think she’s fooling anyone with this level of dishonesty?
I would argue that Obama has, in fact, benefited from the color of her skin. While it’s impossible to know whether she would have been admitted to Princeton had she not been a minority applicant, her own remarks in an October interview suggest that affirmative action may have played a role in her acceptance.
She said, “I wasn’t good on SATs, so all the scores said ‘you don’t belong at Princeton’ … and there were people that saw me, saw my skin color, and they said ‘you are aiming too high.’”
Although Obama did not disclose her SAT scores, if a white applicant had scores as low as Obama implied hers were, they probably would have been rejected.
Her admission to Princeton set the stage for all that followed.
Michelle Obama: "All my scores said I did not belong in Princeton" pic.twitter.com/d6BsNjam1u
— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) October 17, 2025
As privileged as this woman is, as much as she’s been given, she harbors a visceral resentment toward whites that will never be erased. Given her extraordinary fortune, a touch of gratitude and grace, rather than perpetual bitterness, would be a welcome change.
Does Michelle want a retroactive salary for her work as FLOTUS? A special award for the apparent agony she suffered as First Lady? Not following the purpose of her complaints all these years later. https://t.co/rJ0TAisUF0
— Laura Ingraham (@IngrahamAngle) May 5, 2025
Elizabeth writes commentary for Legal Insurrection and The Washington Examiner. She is an academy fellow at The Heritage Foundation. Please follow Elizabeth on X or LinkedIn.
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Comments
What successful legal career are you referring to? After a stint as an associate at Sidley & Austin, it appears that the balance of Moochelle’s career consisted of patronage and make-work positions,
Without a doubt, the worst First Lady in history! Cry harder!!!
Was President Mrs. Wilson worse?
Didn’t she become the president after Wilson became disabled?
It doesn’t make her worse.
They were “problematic” in different ways.
Most first ladies have been graceful occupiers of the white house. The exceptions are Clinton and Obama, two exceptionally entitled, and gutter character bitches. I can’t recall anyone else like them. You’ll note that these two besides being modern times democrats are more feminist than woman.
I’m trying hard to be sympathetic to Big Mike’s misfortunes in life but just can’t seem to.
I would give my right arm to get the oppression and misfortune that Michelle Obama has experienced through her life.
As long as the $40 million net worth came with it.
That cow (or is it bull?) is one of the most ungrateful people to pollute this planet.
What first world problems this Black Woman has experienced. If her ancestors had stayed in Africa, she would be eating boiled pig intestines cooked over an open pit fire, living in a communal hut, and carrying her water in clay pits from a polluted stream.
Hill-da-Beast has her beat, I think. But not by much.
Michelle Obama obviously got admitted to Harvard Law School and had a prestigious legal career because of her skin color. Imagine how many subtle snubs, direct insults and sidelong glances she experienced from people who believed she was only successful because of affirmative action. It must be awful, even soul crushing.
Spappas, I cannot tell if this comment is meant to be sarcastic or not.
T. Ricky – it’s actually appropriate either way you take it. That’s why it’s so fun. The last sentence is the tip-off.
She has all the qualities of the classic ingrate, egomania, martyr complex, hypocrisy, and lying as much as she breathes
Should have a sarc alert in there somewhere
High maintenance lady.
Absolutely humorless. Ianother perpetually aggrieved “victim”.
I recommend an intense course of STFU.
Lady?
A very typical Black woman in America
Racist to the core
No, she isn’t typical. She’s a wealthy ingrate, with a $40 million net worth. If only all black women had to endure the hardships she has had to live.
And I absolutely refuse to capitalize black, because that is using the leftist narrative.
Hey, hey
Ho, ho
Affirmative action’s the way to go
Hey, hey
Ho, ho
Affirmative action’s the way to go
[Repeat endlessly]
Well she’s a guy… So….
“There is another class of coloured people who make a business of keeping the troubles, the wrongs, and the hardships of the Negro race before the public.
Having learned that they are able to make a living out of their troubles, they have grown into the settled habit of advertising their wrongs — partly because they want sympathy and partly because it pays.
Some of these people do not want the Negro to lose his grievances, because they do not want to lose their jobs.” – Booker T. Washington
You can substitute any grievance group for “Negro” and it is just as true as when B. Washington wrote that. The homeless in California is a good example. Billions of dollars gone missing with nothing to show for it because those getting the money don’t want to solve the problem.
For what it’s worth, I’m not the least bit interested in anything Mrs. Obama says, thinks or does. If it weren’t for her red diaper baby husband we would never have heard of her and would be much the richer for being spared her toxic utterances.
Expensive to live in the White House? They lived in 5 star hotel facilities for 8 years, paid nothing for food, utilities, transportation, etc. All while he was making 400K a year, and you find that expensive? I do recall she wanted a salary as FLOTUS. Get over yourself woman, and good riddance to bad garbage.
Hi Mike! Hope all is well with you! … I so wanted to add those remarks to this post, but it was off-topic. I can’t believe she said it.
Don’t forget the income from churning out book deals and speaking fees simply for being the First Lady. Those mansions in Hawaii, DC, and Martha’s Vineyard didn’t buy themselves.
Mrs. Obama reminds me of an anecdote I heard about those who brought emergency supplies to the victims of Hurricane Katrina.
White folks on the Mississippi Gulf Coast: “Thank you so much, and God bless…!”
The Protected Demographic in New Orleans: “Dis all you got?!?!?”
“I heard about” should be “I heard from”.
Edit function, please.
Moochelle has led one of the most privileged lives in human history but she’s so put upon. What an ungrateful bitch.
Michelle Obama’s sense of what’s due Barry and her is a classic example of the old saw: “Excess is not enough.”
The Obama’s have just walked on egg shells their whole lives waiting for 1 to crack.
Please, they went at the country with a wrecking ball and we are still trying to rebuild to where they started.
Especially from his third term. … But, you’re right, he set a lot of dangerous wheels in motion during his eight years in office.
A loathsome person. Those who like her are equally loathsome. Or vile if you prefer. This is based on her history, and her lack of character and grace,
To both the Obamas: have the decency and self awareness to do as other first families have done. Leave Washington DC and disappear from the public eye.
Yup. He never left Washington, D.C. The first thing he did was buy a mansion in Kalorama.
And one on Hawaii.
And one in Chicago,.
And one on Martha’s Vinyard.
Seems to be the Obamas weren’t concerned about climate change and sea levels rising when they bought their waterfront mansions. They wouldn’t have bought them if they actually believed in climate change.
Yeah… funny how the Dhimmi-crat apparatchiks’ loudly-professed “climate change” concerns/hysteria disappear, when they’re contemplating purchasing multiple, palatial, prime waterfront residential real estate.
Bunch of f’in hypocrites.
When reporters visited the White House and asked Michelle for her opinion about the border, she thought they said “boarder” and replied, “My mother likes living here very much.”
Let’s not forget all those vacations she took to all those faraway places taking her mother and daughters with her. Yes she might have had to pay for their airfare, but so what. Beyond first class at coach rates.
What is the name of the first case that Ms. Obama tried?
What is the name of the last case that Ms. Obama tried?
So she took up a seat in a formerly prestigious law school and someone who is not a member of the “protected class” was denied the seat she took?
Her entire career is a grift.
She also complained that she didn’t dare wear braids because white racists think they’re too native and she’d be attacked over a hairdon’t. Meanwhile, all of the fashion mags raved about her fabulous upper arms and fashion sense.
If one is constantly on high alert, determined to find all sorts of ‘ists, isms and phobes’ in the USA they will stumble across them in 2025. Of course these same folks refuse to admit that the society/culture, re those ists, isms and phobes, of the USA in 2025 isn’t close to the same as that of 1825, 1925 or even 1975. They look into the corners for shadows often seeing their own and claim it as evidence. Past time to cut off the entire ‘woe is me, the rest of the US population is out to get me’ narrative.
Of course she can’t be thankful for all the successes she’s had in life, from education to work experience to being First Lady. Marxist theory only has two classes, the victims and the exploiters. If she admits any kind of appreciation, she has to leave that victim class behind. I’ve seen all kinds of people caught in this victimhood trap, miserable and determined to spread that misery around to everybody. And I’ve seen people kick that habit, go out into the world, and be both successful and happy. Addiction to being a victim is a terrible thing. Case in point, above.
easy to see through the anger that drives her to the self-disgust that rules her
“We didn’t get the grace that I think some other [first] families have gotten,” she added.”
Yeah – that’s why you were on every magazine cover for years.
What a miserable human being.
It’s hilarious how the one that was never elected thinks she earned everything and was gifted nothing…in fact, she thinks she fought off takers. It’d be hilarious if she wasn’t serious.
Them there is some czarina-class entitlement.
Contrived and fallacious notions of alleged victimhood and grievance represent the most valuable currency in Dhimmi-crat circles, even among members of the monied, wealthy and shiftless/non-working/parasitic elites. Once you understand that premise, ugly Mooch’s perennial, narcissistic, off-putting and hypocritical faux victimhood-posturing makes perfect sense.
Such was Mooch’s desire to portray herself as an alleged “victim” of non-existent, contrived/alleged “racism,” that she engaged in an incident of unbelievably brazen slander and lying. To wit:
After visiting a Target store in Virginia, to engage in some photo op cosplay as an alleged working-class mom, the baseball cap and aviator sunglasses-clad Obama later related the tale of her store visit on late-night TV as having represented a “feel-good” moment, when Obama described having helped an elderly, white woman shopper (who clearly hadn’t recognized her), by taking an item that was situated on a high shelf. “Well, you didn’t have to make it look so easy,” the grateful shopper told Obama.
A couple of years later, the vile Obama brazenly recycled the same incident, in a puff piece article in Vanity Fair or Vogue, telling the author that the elderly woman shopper had allegedly treated her as the hired help, in asking her to retrieve the item from the shelf.
The Obamas are two utterly wicked, wretched, mendacious and malignantly narcissistic peas in a rotten and putrid pod.
A few years later, a
Long as racist comments are made, racism will stay. I taught her a school that was 33 to 35% American and mourn black. 25% off the boat child immigrant from multiple countries; the rest was Caucasian and ranged from welfare upper middle class. Well, I am ensure there was some snaring going on amongst students, it went both ways! Yet when they had a common ground on a science project, book report, speech, Etc. They learned and did respect each other. Well, not 100%. I had a couple like the woman mentioned in this article.
I don’t buy the premise that Michelle Obama is a woman.
another victim of
being wealthy while being black………oh the painn ohhh the painnnnnnn
Michelle Obama has, INDEED, led a most charmed life. Every door has opened to her and she and her husband are multi-millionaires with extravagant homes in HI, MA and IL, ALL THANKS TO THE RACIST AMERICAN PEOPLE, and she has the temerity to whine and kvetch about what a horrible, terrible, no-good place The United States of America has been to her. I DEFY this cow to demonstrate how what she calls ‘Racism’ has harmed her or her family in any way in the least.
She may respond by pointing out how so many White Folks don’t like her or her husband. Well, Honey, It, for damned sure, ain’t because you are Black. It may well be because you are a TERRIBLE PERSON who promotes the lies about racism and envy to advance your own political agenda.
She, at least, acknowledges that “My Scores indicated that I did not belong here…”. So, now, take the next step and accept the fact that the TRUE meaning of DEI is Didn’t Earn It.
“Many of us blacks still live in fear as we go to the grocery store, walking our dogs.
None that I know of but I don’t live in the inner city that Democrats have turned into free fire zones.
GO AWAY.