Jon Stewart knows how “surreal” it must be for the Obamas to watch Donald Trump’s presidency.
The Daily Show host appeared on Michelle Obama and Craig Robinson’s IMO podcast on Wednesday, where he asked the former first lady what it’s felt like to have Trump as a successor.
“I imagine for you and your family…that it’s a surreal experience for you guys because of the effort that you put into building something up and to watch it be corrupted,” Stewart said.
“To have this perversion of leadership, I imagine, is especially difficult to digest,” he added. “There’s a surreal quality to it.”
“Although I have to say, you guys left money on the table,” he quipped, referencing Melania Trump’s crypto cash grab, “a Michelle meme coin.”
Mrs. Obama replied, “I didn’t even know it was possible; there were so many things” they could have apparently done to make money off the White House. Trump’s net worth has increased by $4 billion since he became president, largely fueled by his crypto investments.
Trump has also racked up tens of millions of dollars in settlements against major companies such as ABC, Meta, X, and Paramount, with much of that money designated for his future presidential library fund, which has since been dissolved. Lawmakers have questioned where the money actually went.
Stewart joked that the Obamas missed an opportunity. “You guys didn’t do a pump-and-dump,” he said. “You left some money on the table.”
Since leaving office, the Obamas struck a deal with Netflix through their production company Higher Ground. “You know, we could have had a Netflix deal a decade ago,” Mrs. Obama quipped in response.
Added Stewart, “You could have had a weapons company! You could’ve sold missiles to yourself! Don and Eric have a drone company—I don’t even know what to say.” Stewart said the grifting is just one way that Trump has “perverted” the office.
“It’s the level of corruption that is, in some ways, maybe it’s doing a favor by making the current power structure and dynamic of this country untenable because of how explicitly corrupt,” he added.
Michelle Obama said that she and Barack did not imagine this version of the White House when Obama was in office.
“What we were saying about the rolling back of women’s rights,” she said, giving an example, “When things are OK, it is easier to take what you have for granted… and to think, ‘Well, you know, there will always be somebody there who wouldn’t possibly do this. We’ve never had somebody who would do this,’ and you just assume that’s going to be the way it is.”
That said, Obama believes an underlying greed was waiting to emerge before Trump came along. “I think at some level, we were there as a country, just a little unclear, just a little like, ‘Maybe we can get a little more, maybe I can get more of a tax break, maybe we can get richer than we are. Maybe we can get rights changed faster than ever before.’”
And yet, she still expressed hope that the country can get back on a better path.
“The kind of growth you would hope for, for the country, that each generation, everything gets better and better and better. And that was actually happening,” the former first lady said. “Until we get to a point where there’s a generation that didn’t even remember what was wrong in the first place, never saw it.”
“I mean, you think about all the young people who only Barack Obama is their president,” she concluded. “That was their America. There is that truth too.”
