Michelle Obama opened up about leaving Washington, D.C. with her husband, former President Barack Obama, after Donald Trump’s inauguration.
“You walk through the Capitol, you wave goodbye, you get on Marine One, and you take your last flight flying over the Capitol,” she said in Tuesday’s debut episode of the “Michelle Obama: The Light Podcast,” according to People.
Then, the former first lady dismantled one of Trump’s very first lies in office: his claim that a massive crowd turned out to witness his inauguration.
″[T]here weren’t that many people there,” she said. “We saw it, by the way!”
Trump, who has always been obsessed with crowd size, was reportedly enraged when the turnout for his inauguration was smaller than the turnout for Obama’s 2008 celebration. Trump lied about the crowd size, and infamously sent Sean Spicer, then White House Press Secretary, to argue with the media about it.
Spicer called it “the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration, period,” which Trump advisor Kellyanne Conway defended as “alternative facts.”
The former first lady called that final day in Washington “emotional for so many different reasons,” according to People. And she noted the lack of diversity among Trump’s guests.
“There was no diversity, there was no colour on that stage,” she told interviewer Hoda Kotb. “There was no reflection of the broader sense of America.”
As they left Washington, she finally let her emotions out.
“When those doors shut, I cried for 30 minutes straight, uncontrollable sobbing, because that’s how much we were holding it together for eight years,” she said.