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Michelle Obama shuns 'mean-spirited' politics in memoir

By Danielle Haynes
Former first lady Michelle Obama said she could never forgive President Donald Trump for risking her family's safety with his rhetoric. File Photo by Gary I Rothstein/UPI
Former first lady Michelle Obama said she could never forgive President Donald Trump for risking her family's safety with his rhetoric. File Photo by Gary I Rothstein/UPI | License Photo

Nov. 9 (UPI) -- Former first lady Michelle Obama indicated in her forthcoming memoir that she's unlikely to run for office because she's not a fan of politics, noting the "mean-spirited" people like President Donald Trump who questioned her husband's birthplace and religion.

Her memoir, Becoming, is set to be released Tuesday. It offers an intimate look at her life before living in the White House, her time as first lady and why a run for president is probably not in her future.

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She wrote that she's never been a fan of politics and that her time as first lady and during former President Barack Obama's campaign did little to dispel that.

"If I'd learned anything from the ugliness of the campaign, from the myriad of ways people had sought to write me off as angry or unbecoming, it was that public judgment sweeps in to fill any void. ... I knew that I would never allow myself to get that banged up again," Michelle Obama wrote.

She said she was particularly bothered by so-called "birthers" who spread the conspiracy that Barack Obama had not been born in the United States.

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"The whole [birther] thing was crazy and mean-spirited, of course, its underlying bigotry and xenophobia hardly concealed. But it was also dangerous, deliberately meant to stir up the wingnuts and kooks," she wrote. "What if someone with an unstable mind loaded a gun and drove to Washington? What if that person went looking for our girls? Donald Trump, with his loud and reckless innuendos, was putting my family's safety at risk. And for this I'd never forgive him."

Asked Friday about that passage, Trump told reporters he hadn't seen the book.

"She got paid a lot of money to write a book," he said on the South Lawn of the White House prior to his departure for France. "And they always insist that you come up with [something] controversial.

"Well, I'll give you a little controversy back: I'll never forgive [former President Barack Obama] for what he did to our United States military by not funding it properly. It was depleted. Everything was old and tired. And I came in, and I had to fix it.

"What he did to our military made this country very unsafe for you and you and you."

A previous version of this story mischaracterized the genre of Michelle Obama's forthcoming book.

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