In Michelle Obama's new book, "The Light We Carry," which comes out Tuesday, she writes that the Democrats losing the 2016 election to former President Donald Trump "still hurts."
"It shook me profoundly to hear the man who'd replace my husband as president openly and unapologetically using ethnic slurs, making selfishness and hate somehow acceptable."
"It felt like something much uglier than a simple political defeat," Michelle Obama said in a clip from the audio version of her forthcoming book obtained by NPR.
"I couldn't help but return to the choice our country had made to replace Barack Obama with Donald Trump. What were we to take from that?" Obama said.
She will be interviewed on NPR on Tuesday.
"Barack and I always tried to operate on the principles of hope and hard work — choosing to overlook the bad in favor of the good, believing that most of us shared common goals and that progress could be made and measured, however incrementally, over time," Obama said.
"We'd tried to live those principles out loud, recognizing that we made it as far as we had despite, and maybe even in defiance of, the bigotry and bias so deeply embedded in American life. We understood that our presence as Black people in the White House said something about what was possible," Michelle Obama read.
"It shocked me to hear him speaking about differentness as if it were a threat," she said of Trump, who succeeded former President Barack Obama.
"Stuck in my house over the frightening early months of 2020, I saw no logic to any of it. What I saw was a president whose lack of integrity was reflected in an escalating national death count and whose poll numbers were still decent."
Michelle Obama is a best-selling author of the memoir "Becoming." She is a graduate of Princeton University and Harvard University Law School.
The Obamas have not returned to live in Chicago. They live in a luxurious home in Washington, D.C.