Michelle Obama announces she will not attend Donald Trump's inauguration

If former President Barack Obama has already confirmed his presence at Donald Trump's inauguration at the White House on January 20, his wife Michelle Obama will not join him. A spokesperson for the couple confirmed the news to the magazine People Tuesday January 14, without specifying the reason for his absence.

A few days ago, the former first lady had already made the headlines in the US for missing the funeral of former President Jimmy Carter, which took place on January 9. Funeral where she would have been seated next to the future 47th President of the United States.

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According to a journalist from CNN Michelle Obama was “still in Hawaii on an extended vacation” on the day of the ceremony, even though her advisors had attributed this absence to a scheduling problem.

A break with tradition

The absence, voluntary or not, of Michelle Obama will mark a break with the tradition which requires former presidents to attend, with their wives, the inauguration of the new president-elect. A tradition already broken by Donald Trump, who did not attend Joe Biden's swearing-in in January 2021, making him the first outgoing president to skip the ceremony in more than 150 years.

Michelle Obama, for her part, has never hidden her disagreements with Donald Trump and strongly campaigned for her competitor Kamala Harris during the presidential campaign. In a podcast broadcast in 2023, the former first lady even expressed her disgust at “looking at the opposite of what we represented”. A disgust that she had to hide during the inauguration of the Republican president in 2017. “There was no diversity, there was no color on this stage, there was no reflection of broader sense of America.”