Michelle Obama laid into Donald Trump with a passionate statement, one day after rabid Trump supporters launched a siege on Capitol Hill that ended in four dead and hours of violence and destruction. Calling the president “infantile and unpatriotic,” the former First Lady called out the hypocrisy of the reaction to the attempted coup and the response to the Black Lives Matter protests last summer. Her heart “had fallen harder and faster” than she could remember while watching the Capitol riots.
— Michelle Obama (@MichelleObama) January 7, 2021
“Like all of you, I watched as a gang — organized, violent, and mad they’d lost an election — laid siege to the United States Capitol,” Obama wrote in a statement posted to Twitter. “They set up gallows. They proudly waved the traitorous flag of the Confederacy through the halls. They desecrated the center of American government. And once authorities finally gained control of the situation, these rioters and gang members were led out of the building not in handcuffs, but free to carry on with their days. The day was a fulfillment of the wishes of an infantile and unpatriotic president who can’t handle the truth of his own failures.”
Obama called out the double standard concerning the BLM protests — that peaceful protestors simply marching, completely unarmed, asking for justice and racial equality, were pepper sprayed and shot with rubber bullets by roving armies of police officers in riot gear. Protestors quietly demonstrating near the White House were teargassed so that Trump could go to a nearby church for a photo op. Five thousand protestors in NYC were corralled onto a bridge by a police brigade and then arrested for breaking curfew after they forced to remain outside for hours against their will.
“For all those who call others patriotic for simply taking a knee in silent protest, for those who wonder why we need to be reminded that Black Lives Matter at all, yesterday made it painfully clear that certain Americans are, in fact, allowed to denigrate the flag and symbols of our nation,” Obama wrote. “They’ve just got to look the right way. It also means coming to grips with the reality that millions voted for a man so obviously willing to burn our democracy down for his own ego.”