Conservative media personalities are criticizing comments that were made by former First Lady Michelle Obama earlier this week at the Inbound 2017 conference in Boston.
The former FLOTUS sounded off about the 2016 presidential race between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, saying Wednesday, “Any woman who voted against Hillary Clinton voted against their own voice.”
“What does it mean for us as women that we look at those two candidates, as women, and many of us said, that guy, he’s better for me, his voice is more true to me,” Obama continued. “Well, to me that just says you don’t like your voice. You like the thing you’re told to like.”
Members of conservative media are having a field day over Obama’s remarks, and conservative women in particular have been weighing in.
On Fox News, both Tomi Lahren and Judge Jeanine Pirro understood Obama to be saying that women couldn’t be trusted to think for themselves.
“To suggest that women are so simple that they vote based on their reproductive organs only — or Madeleine Albright saying that there’s a special place in hell for women who don’t vote for other women is just so simplistic it throws us back to the Dark Ages,” Pirro said on “Fox and Friends.” But Pirro misquoted former Secretary of State Albright. She actually said there is a “special place in hell for women who don’t help other women,” not “vote for.”
Lahren sarcastically quipped, “apparently we are not smart or independent enough to form an original thought.”
“You’re dang right I voted against Hillary Clinton, and the fact Mrs. Obama thinks that makes me less of a woman tells you everything you need to know about the left,” Lahren continued during her “Final Thoughts” segment in the same style as her old rant gig on “The Blaze.” Obama did not say voting for Trump made anyone “less of a woman.”
“Oh, and trust me, I didn’t lose my voice. You’re gonna hear my voice, loud and clear,” Lahren said. “How dare you diminish and degrade my vote. How dare you look down on Trump-supporting women.”
Commentator S. E. Cupp echoed the ideas of Pirro and Lahren during her Thursday night broadcast of HLN’s “Unflitered.”
“With all due respect to Mrs. Obama, that’s disgusting,” she said. “This is condescending gender imperialism that decrees that just because I’m a woman, I’m obligated to vote for your corrupt, dishonest, morally-bereft, out of touch, and totally unaccountable candidate, who also just happens to be a woman.”
“I didn’t vote for Trump, but how dare you accuse women who did of liking the thing they’re told to like,” Cupp said. “There were countless good reasons not to vote for Hillary Clinton. You know what, plenty of Democrats agreed.”
These commentators did not mention how Obama finished her remarks at the Inbound 2017 conference: by hoping for the best for Trump.
“We want the sitting president to be successful because we live in this country. He is our commander in chief, he was voted in,” she said. “It is very difficult to lead when you have a peanut gallery of people who don’t know what they’re talking about second-guessing what you do.”
“Barack is not going to turn into what this president was, which is somebody tweeting in the wind and stirring up mess without really knowing what they’re talking about,” Obama finished.